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Writing Beamer presentations in org-mode

1. Introduction

1.1. Overview

This presentation provides an illustration of some of the capabilities of the Beamer export in org mode:

  1. simple slides (this one),
  2. slides with special blocks,
  3. multi-column slides and
  4. the use of Babel for literate programming.

This file should be exported using M-x org-export-dispatch specifying l for \LaTeX{} and then P, for instance, to generate the PDF.

2. Methodology

2.1. A simple slide

This slide consists of some text with a number of bullet points:

  • the first, very important, point!
  • the previous point shows the use of bold emphasis which is translated to a \alert{} directive in \LaTeX.

The above list could be numbered or any other type of list and may include sub-lists.

2.2. A more complex slide

This slide illustrates the use of Beamer blocks. The following text, with its own headline, is displayed in a block:

  1. Org mode increases productivity   B_theorem
    • org mode means not having to remember \LaTeX commands.
    • it is based on ASCII text which is inherently portable.
    • Emacs!

    \hfill \(\qed\)

2.3. Two columns

  1. A block   BMCOL
    • this slide consists of two columns
    • the first (left) column has no heading and consists of text
    • the second (right) column has an image and is enclosed in an example block
  2. A screenshot   B_example BMCOL
    a-simple-slide.png

2.4. Babel

This slide shows some code and resulting output using Babel. Note the specification of BEAMER_act property for the second column.

  1. Octave code   BMCOL B_block
    A = [1 2 ; 3 4]
b = [1; 1];
x = A\b
  2. The output   BMCOL B_block
    A =

   1   2
   3   4

x =

  -1
   1

3. Conclusions

3.1. Summary

  • org is an incredible tool for time management
  • but it is also excellent for writing and for preparing presentations
  • Beamer is a very powerful \LaTeX{} package for presentations
  • the combination is unbeatable!

Documentation from the orgmode.org/worg/ website (either in its HTML format or in its Org format) is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3 or later. The code examples and css stylesheets are licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 or later.