space in latex presentation

LaTeX-Tutorial.com

Latex space guide: vertical, horizontal, text and math modes, and much more.

This tutorial will deal with LaTeX spacing:

• First, we are going to explore the basic macros that LaTeX provides to insert horizontal and vertical space . We will also talk about infinitely stretchable space , one cool tool that can be used, among many things, to align text.
• Then, we will see what predefined lengths for different spaces of the page ( margins , indentation , and separation between paragraphs ) have LaTeX built-in and how we can change them in different ways.
• After that, we will deal with dots and spacing . Although you may have not noticed, spacing after sentences is a bit larger than between words in professional books. The TeX system also takes this into account. However, it is not easy for a machine to know when a human ends a sentence. We will explain when the algorithm that TeX implements may fail, and how we can help the system in such cases.
• Next, we will deal with spacing inside math mode . The contents of this section will be very useful to produce good-looking equations and mathematical expressions. We will talk about both the commands provided to produce spacing inside math mode and how to use them properly in a variety of situations.
• Finally, we will present an easy way to deal with interlinear spacing without having to worry about TeX dimensions, using the setlength package.

1. Horizontal LaTeX space

In LaTeX, horizontal space is produced using the \hspace{} command . This command gets passed as a mandatory argument a valid TeX dimension ( positive or negative ) and introduces the horizontal space determined by that dimension.

You can think of it as inserting a completely blank word so that spaces before and after it will produce an extra space accounting for the interword space.

Note again that the dimension inserted can also be negative . In the following example you can see how you can use this fact to produce some fancy results:

which produces:

• Observe how the negative space works as backward space , producing some curious outputs.
• Besides the common dimensions, TeX provides the dimension em, which corresponds to the width of a capital m letter in the current font , so that the spacing is relative to the font used.

It is important to note that TeX removes space from the beginning or end of each line of output text, except at the beginning and end of a paragraph .

This includes also space added with \hspace !

If you want to prevent this behavior, the \hspace* command is provided; it does the same as \hspace except that the space it produces is never removed, even when it comes at the beginning or end of a line.

2. Vertical LaTeX space

The analogous of the \hspace command for vertical spacing is, of course, called \vspace . You will almost always use this command between paragraphs; however, take into account that, when used within a paragraph, the vertical space is added after the line in which the \vspace appears, not in the place you put it.

Check at the following example:

Compiling this code yields the following result:

• Note that now the dimension ex has been introduced: it corresponds to the height of an x in the given font .
• Just as it removes horizontal space from the beginning and end of line, TeX removes vertical space that comes at the beginning or end of a page. The \vspace* command creates vertical space that is never removed .

3. Infinitely stretchable space

Inserting infinitely stretchable space is useful for positioning text inside our document. Without going into technical details, and expressing it in plain words, this kind of space stretches as much as it can, so that every other content is pushed aside .

• We can create this kind of space horizontally using \hfill and
• vertically using \vfill .

Here is an example of how the horizontal stretchable space works :

This code produces the following output:

Look at the last command in the example, it looks different. In its essence, is the same as the previous commands, because \hfill is defined by LaTeX to be \hspace{\fill} .

In the last case, since the space was at the end of the line, if we had used simply \hfill it would have been removed, obtaining left-aligned text. We prevented this behavior by using \hfill*

The \vfill command is used analogously to position text in the page. It is also true that \vfill is equivalent to \vspace{\fill} , so if you want to insert the space at the end of the page you will have to use \vspace*{\fill} so that it isn’t removed by TeX.

4. Horizontal dotted line in LaTeX

As a curious fact, the command \dotfill acts just like \hfill , but it produces dots instead of spaces. \hrulefill works the same way, but produces a horizontal line (which in TeX jargon is called a rule, and thus the name).

Here is a modified version of the above code:

which produces the following:

5. Changing the predefined spacing lengths

Although you don’t tell LaTeX explicitly how wide the text should be, or how many lines a page should have, the system has some predefined lengths that determine most of the spacing of the page . These length parameters look like commands (that is, start with a \), but should be changed using special parameters for lengths, and have to be set always to a valid TeX dimension.

Let’s explore some of the most important length parameters:

• \parindent : Amount of indentation at the beginning of a normal paragraph.
• \textwidth : The width of the text on the page.
• \textheight : The height of the body of the page (which is the height of everything on the page except header and footer).
• \parskip : Extra vertical space inserted between paragraphs. By default, LaTeX does not leave any extra space between paragraphs, so \parskip has a natural length of zero in most document classes.
• \baselineskip : Normal vertical distance from the bottom of one line to the bottom of the next line in the same paragraph

Observe that these values are actually useful to know so that you can express the lengths inside the document (size of images, extra spacing, etc.) in terms of these values.

To declare or change lengths, the following commands are provided:

• \newlenght : Defines a new length command. For example, \newlength{\mylength} defines a new \mylenght command with value 0cm. An error occurs if the command \mylength is already defined.
• \setlength : Sets the value of a lenght command. For example, you can set the value of \baselineskip to 2em using \setlength{\baselineskip}{2em} .
• \addtolength : Increments the value of a length command by the specified amount.

For example:

sets the new length \mylength to 1.8cm.

• \settowidth : Sets the value of a length command equal to the width of the specified piece of text . So \settowidth{\parindent}{\bf word} sets the paragraph indentation to the width that takes up “ word ” once typeset.
• \settoheight and \settodepth : These commands act like the previous one, except that they set the height and depth of the command to the height and depth of the specified text , respectively.

Finally, it is important to know that these declarations obey the usual scoping rules. This means that, i nside the preamble, they affect the whole document , but inside an environment or group they only affect the current environment or group .

6. Space after a period

Typesetters often put a little extra space after a sentence-ending period. While easier for a human typesetter, this is a difficult task for a system like TeX, since it may have trouble deciding which periods end sentences. The algorithm that TeX follows is simple: it just assumes that a period ends a sentence unless it follows an uppercase letter . This works most of the time, but not always: the most remarkable exceptions are abbreviations like ‘etc.’.

You can tell TeX that a period doesn’t end a sentence by using a \ command (that is, a \ character followed by a space or the end of a line; you can think of it as an empty command) to make a usual space after the period.

For example, the following code will prevent extra space after the period of “etc.” :

This will produce the following result with correct spacing.:

You can compare it with the case we don’t tell TeX that the point does not end the sentence, this adds extra space:

Note that in the above code, we didn’t leave any space between the dot and the space command; if you leave any, it will be treated as usual inter-word spacing and will be added to the space generated by the command. However, as with the rest of the commands, you can leave as much space as you want after the \ command; only one will be printed.

7. LaTeX space in math mode

In this section of the tutorial, we are going to deal with spacing inside math mode . If you are using LaTeX, it is very likely that you often write mathematics, but in the rare case you don’t, feel free to skip this section.

First, we will see what spacing commands are offered inside math mode, and then we will see how and when to use them between and inside formulas.

– Spacing commands

There are several commands that typeset blank space inside math mode . Their length is specified in terms of the unit mu , which is a math unit equal to 1/18em , where the size of em is taken from the math symbols family.

The most used command to produce spacing in math mode is \quad, which is equal to 18mu. This name comes from the traditional quad of space in the hot-metal technology for printing. It is just a standard inside the printing industry. Also, \qquad produces a double quad . Check the following table for more commands:

Observe that a space, usual space, produces no space in math mode; so if you want to separate variables that are next to each other, you will have to do it explicitly. The fact that TeX ignores all spaces inside math mode also has its positive side, since you can organize the code, and clearly separate different parts, without worrying about how many spaces will be printed.

– Spacing between formulas

Now, let’s see some technical conventions related to spacing to produce good mathematical content . First, we will deal with spacing between different equations , and in the following section, we will talk about spacing inside equations . Math displays, sometimes, contain more than one formula; for example, they can have some side condition on the variables that appear. Consider the following example:

\( x^2\geq x, x\geq1\)

As you can see, it doesn’t look right. Here, the correct spacing is produced by a double quad , so that the code:

produces the desired output:

\(x^2\geq x, \qquad x\geq 1\)

Note again how the spaces before and after the \qquad don’t matter for the typeset spacing.

However, if the previous formula were to be typeset inline, a single space would have been enough, as you can see here: \(x^2\geq x, \ x\geq 1\) (this was produced using \ instead of \qquad).

– Spacing within formulas

Since inside math mode spaces are ignored, TeX automatically does the spacing of formulas so that they look right. However, sometimes you will have to give TeX some help, since the number of possible formulas is vast, and not all possible cases are covered.

The basic elements of space that TeX puts into formulas are called thin spaces , medium spaces, and thick spaces , which manually can be produced using \, \: and \; respectively.

• Basically, thick spaces are used around comparisons (=, ≥ , . . . )
• Medium spaces around operations (+, − , . . . )
• Thin spaces in a variety of situations

Now let’s see where we can help TEX.

Formulas involving calculus usually have an extra thin space between an expression and a differential ( dx , dy , . . . ). For example, integrals should be written as:

to produce:

\(\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} \, dx \)

Thin spaces should also be added after exclamation points (which stand for the factorial operation in a formula) if the next character is a letter or a number or an opening delimiter. Here are some common formulas where this can happen:

and the output produced is this

\(\binom{m}{n}=\cfrac{m!}{n! \, (m-n)!}, \quad \cfrac{11!}{6! \, 2!}, \quad (n-1)! \, n=n!\)

If you look closely enough you can see the difference that the thin space makes!

There are other situations where, due to a certain unlucky combination of shapes, the mathematics don’t look as good as you would expect. Maybe the symbols are too close together or there is too much space. In such cases, intuitive use of the \, and \! spaces will obtain more satisfactory results. Three common situations where this applies are:

which produce the output

\( \sqrt{2} \, x,\quad \int \! \! \! \int_C f\,dx,\quad x^2\! /2 \)

We can try the same example omitting the spaces, and judge the difference:

\( \sqrt{2} x, \int \int_C f dx, x^2/2 \)

Line spacing in LaTeX

The setspace package provides the commands \singlespacing, \onehalfspacing, and \doublespacing to easily change the interlinear separation between the normal spacing, one and a half spacing, and double spacing , respectively. You can use them either in the preamble or inside the document, and every time you use one of them it will override the spacing set by the previous one.

You can see in this example how they work:

The output of this code is shown below. The package also provides the command \setstretch{x} , that can be used to produce an x times separation between the lines; this means that \setstretch{1} is the same as \singlespacing whereas \setstrech{1.5} is the same as \onehalfspacing .

In this tutorial, we have seen the main LaTeX features you need to know when dealing with spacing. From the basics to create a given vertical and horizontal space simply giving LaTeX the dimension of that space, to the more advanced use of infinitely stretchable space .

We have also seen many topics related to typography. Although the ideas discussed in this matter may seem only for perfectionists, remember that LaTeX is ultimately a typesetting system to produce high-quality documents with your personal computer. It’s like a new stage of book typography. And this great power to produce documents like a professional typist at home will not be completely exploited unless we pay attention to these kinds of details!

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LaTeX/Presentations

LaTeX can be used for creating presentations. There are several packages for the task, such as- Powerdot , Prosper , Seminar , etc, however, the Beamer package is the most widely used.

It should be noted that Latex produces the presentation as a PDF which can be viewed in fullscreen mode with some pdf reader (e.g. Okular , Evince or Adobe Reader). If you want to navigate in your presentation, you can use the almost invisible links in the bottom right corner without leaving the fullscreen mode.

• 1.1 Title page and author information
• 1.2.1 Sections and subsections
• 1.2.2 References (Beamer)
• 1.3.1 The Built-in solution
• 1.3.2 User-defined themes
• 1.3.3.1 Math Fonts
• 1.4 Frames Options
• 1.5 Hyperlink navigation
• 1.6 Animations
• 1.7 Handout mode
• 1.8 Columns
• 1.10 PDF options
• 1.11 Numbering slides
• 2 The Powerdot package
• 3.1 Beamer based themes/examples
• 3.2 References

The Beamer package [ edit | edit source ]

The beamer package is provided with most LaTeX distributions, but is also available from CTAN . If you use MikTeX, all you have to do is to include the beamer package and let LaTeX download all wanted packages automatically. The documentation explains the features in great detail. You can also have a look at the PracTex article Beamer by Example . [1]

The beamer package also loads many useful packages including xcolors, hyperref , etc. An introductory example and its output are shown below.

In above code, the Beamer package is loaded by the \documentclass{beamer} command in the header. The usual header information may then be specified. In Beamer presentation a frame is an equivalent term for the slide (used in MS office). A frame is defined using the environment \begin{frame} ...... \end{frame} . The \frametitle{} command specifies the title for each slide. The frame title and subtitle can also be passed with the environment as following.

The usual environments ( itemize , enumerate , equation , etc.) may be used. Inside frames, you can use environments like block , theorem , proof , ... Also, \maketitle is possible to create the Title page, if title and author are set.

Title page and author information [ edit | edit source ]

The title page is the first page where one may insert following information

• Title and subtitle (optional)- Use \title and \subtitle commands, or use \title[short title (optional)]{Long title}{subtitle (optional)}
• Author(s) name- Use the \author{} command.
• Institute name- Use the \institute command. Note the use of \inst{1} and \inst{2} commands to associate the authors with their respective institutes.
• Date and Place of presentation- It can be inserted using the \date[short date(optional)]{Long date} command.
• Logo of Institute, etc.

It should be noted that the information within square braces, i.e., [ ] is optional.

It is important to include the \maketitle command in the document (as in above code) to create the title frame. The commands \maketitle and \titlepage are equivalent.

Table of Contents [ edit | edit source ]

The table of contents, with the current section highlighted, is displayed by:

This can be done automatically at the beginning of each section using the following code in the preamble:

Or for subsections:

Sections and subsections [ edit | edit source ]

As in all other LaTeX files, it is possible to structure the document using

Those commands have to be put before and between frames. They will modify the table of contents with the argument in brackets. The optional argument will be shown in the headline navigation on the slide, depending on the theme used. You can use \sectionpage macro to generate a separator slide for a declared section, for example

References (Beamer) [ edit | edit source ]

The following example shows a manually made references slide containing two entries:

As the reference list grows, the reference slide will divide into two slides and so on, through use of the allowframebreaks option. Individual items can be cited after adding an 'optional' label to the relevant bibitem stanza. The citation call is simply \cite . Beamer also supports limited customization of the way references are presented (see the manual).

The different types of referenced work are indicated with a little symbol (e.g. a book, an article, etc.). The symbol is set with the commands beamertemplatebookbibitems and beamertemplatearticlebibitems . It is also possible to use setbeamertemplate directly, like so

Other possible types of bibliography items, besides book and article , include e.g. online , triangle and text . It is also possible to have user defined bibliography items by including a graphic.

If one wants to have full references appear as foot notes, use the \footfullcite from the biblatex package. For example, it is possible to use

Themes [ edit | edit source ]

Beamer offers two ways for define the themes- 1) Use built-in themes, 2) Use user-defined themes.

The Built-in solution [ edit | edit source ]

Beamer has several built-in themes which can be used by specifying their "Name" and their "color" in the preamble. This Theme Matrix contains the various theme and color combinations included with Beamer . For more customizing options, have a look to the official documentation included in your distribution of beamer , particularly the part Change the way it looks .

The full list of themes is:

The full list of color themes is:

User-defined themes [ edit | edit source ]

First you can specify the outertheme , which defines the head and the footline of each slide.

Here is a list of all available outer and inner themes:

You can define the color of every element:

Colors can be defined as usual:

Block styles can also be defined:

You can also suppress the navigation symbols:

Fonts [ edit | edit source ]

You may also change the fonts for particular elements. If you wanted the title of the presentation as rendered by \begin { frame } [plain] \titlepage\end { frame } to occur in a serif font instead of the default sanserif, you would use:

You could take this a step further if you are using OpenType fonts with Xe(La)TeX and specify a serif font with increased size and oldstyle proportional alternate number glyphs:

Math Fonts [ edit | edit source ]

The default settings for beamer use a different set of math fonts than one would expect from creating a simple math article. One quick fix for this is to use

Frames Options [ edit | edit source ]

The options to a frame can be passed as following

Some of the useful options and their description is following.

• plain : This option removes all the formatting from your slide and thus give you extra space to accommodate a large figure or a large table.
• shrink : If you want to include lots of text on a slide use the shrink option.
• allowframebreaks  : option will auto-create new frames if there is too much content to be displayed on one.
• fragile : Before using any verbatim environment (like listings ), you should pass the option fragile to the frame environment, as verbatim environments need to be typeset differently. Usually, the form fragile=singleslide is usable (for details see the manual). Note that the fragile option may not be used with \frame commands since it expects to encounter a \end { frame } , which should be alone on a single line.

Hyperlink navigation [ edit | edit source ]

Internal and external hyperlinks can be used in beamer to assist navigation. Clean looking buttons can also be added.

By default the beamer class adds navigation buttons in the bottom right corner. To remove them one can place

in the preamble.

Animations [ edit | edit source ]

It is possible to make figure and text to appear and disappear using the commands such as \pause, \uncover, \only and \itemize<a-b>. Text or figures after these commands will display after one of the following events (which may vary between PDF viewers): pressing space, return or page down on the keyboard, or using the mouse to scroll down or click the next slide button. A short explanation of each command is as follows and refer to chapter 9 of the Beamer manual for more details..

The \pause statement can be used as following to provide a break. I.e. the text after the command will be displayed on next event (button click/ key press/etc.)

The \uncover command specifies the appearance explicitly; \only works the same but without reserving space when hidden.

The \item command specifies appearance and disappearance of text by using <a-b> where a and b are the numbers of the events the item is to be displayed for (inclusive). For example:

A simpler approach for revealing one item per click is to use \begin { itemize } [<+->] .

In all these cases, pressing page up, scrolling up, or clicking the previous slide button in the navigation bar will backtrack through the sequence.

Above command uncovers the item and they are visible only on/after the specified frame numbers. One may also use the \setbeamercovered{transparent} command to see the uncovered items, which are shown with little opacity. This means if the visible text is in black then the uncovered text will be in gray. One may use \setbeamercovered{invisible} to revert this setting.

Similar option is also available for formatting the text. for example if you want the text to be of specific style then you may use \style<3->{Text} command. For example one may use \alert<3->{Some text.} which will show the specified text in the respective formatting for specified slides. Similarly one may use

\textbf, \textit, \textsl, \textrm, \textsf, \textcolor, \structure etc. commands.

Same is true for theorem, corollary, and proof environments. An example is given below.

For the tables one must add \onslide slide command before placing the new line (i.e., \\) .

Test 1 & repeat & 14.5 & 656 \onslide<3-> \\

Handout mode [ edit | edit source ]

In beamer class, the default mode is presentation which makes the slides. However, you can work in a different mode that is called handout by setting this option when calling the class:

This mode is useful to see each slide only one time with all its stuff on it, making any \itemize [<+->] environments visible all at once (for instance, printable version). Nevertheless, this makes an issue when working with the only command, because its purpose is to have only some text or figures at a time and not all of them together.

If you want to solve this, you can add a statement to specify precisely the behavior when dealing with only commands in handout mode. Suppose you have a code like this

These pictures being completely different, you want them both in the handout, but they cannot be both on the same slide since they are large. The solution is to add the handout statement to have the following:

This will ensure the handout will make a slide for each picture.

Now imagine you still have your two pictures with the only statements, but the second one show the first one plus some other graphs and you don't need the first one to appear in the handout. You can thus precise the handout mode not to include some only commands by:

The command can also be used to hide frames, e.g.

or even, if you have written a frame that you don't want anymore but maybe you will need it later, you can write

and this will hide your slide in both modes.

A last word about the handout mode is about the notes. Actually, the full syntax for a frame is

and you can write your notes about a frame in the field note (many of them if needed). Using this, you can add an option

The first one is useful when you make a presentation to have only the notes you need, while the second one could be given to those who have followed your presentation or those who missed it, for them to have both the slides with what you said.

Columns [ edit | edit source ]

Columns environment divides a slide (vertically) into columns. Example

Blocks [ edit | edit source ]

Enclosing text in the block environment creates a distinct, headed block of text (a blank heading can be used). This allows to visually distinguish parts of a slide easily. There are three basic types of block. Their formatting depends on the theme being used.

PDF options [ edit | edit source ]

You can specify the default options of your PDF. [2]

Numbering slides [ edit | edit source ]

It is possible to number slides using this snippet:

However, this poses two problems for some presentation authors: the title slide is numbered as the first one, and the appendix or so-called "backup" (aka appendix, reserve) slides are included in the total count despite them not being intended to be public until a "hard" question is asked. [3] This is where two features come in:

• Ability to exclude certain frames from being numbered. For instance, this may be used at the title slide to avoid counting it:
• This stuff works around the problem of counting the backup frames:

The Powerdot package [ edit | edit source ]

The powerdot package is an alternative to beamer. It is available from CTAN . The documentation explains the features in great detail.

The powerdot package is loaded by calling the powerdot class:

The usual header information may then be specified.

Inside the usual document environment, multiple slide environments specify the content to be put on each slide.

Simple presentations [ edit | edit source ]

The beamer class is very powerful and provides lots of features. For a very simple presentation, a class based on article can be used.

Beamer based themes/examples [ edit | edit source ]

Some of the nice examples of the presentation are available below

• The Nord beamer theme
• Metropolis theme
• Kenton Hamaluik
• A list of theme maintained at github

References [ edit | edit source ]

• ↑ Andrew Mertz and William Slough, Beamer by Example
• ↑ Other possible values are defined in the hyperref manual
• ↑ Appendix Slides in Beamer: Controlling frame numbers

Links [ edit | edit source ]

• Wikipedia:Beamer (LaTeX)
• Beamer user guide (pdf) from CTAN
• The powerdot class (pdf) from CTAN
• A tutorial for creating presentations using beamer

• Pages using deprecated enclose attributes
• Wikibooks pages with to-do lists

Navigation menu

Formatting: fonts and spacing

This lesson shows how to change the spacing elements in a document and how to add explicit formatting instructions to the LaTeX source.

We have already seen that a blank line in your input will generate a new paragraph in LaTeX. This shows up as the paragraph will start with an indent.

Paragraph spacing

One common style is to have no indents for paragraphs, but instead to have a ‘blank line’ between them. We can achieve that using the parskip package.

Forcing a new line

Most of the time, you should not force a new line in LaTeX: you almost certainly want a new paragraph or to use parskip , as we’ve just seen, to put a ‘blank line’ between paragraphs.

There are a few places where you use \\ to start a new line without starting a new paragraph:

Almost always, if you are not in one of those special places, you should not use \\ .

Adding explicit space

We can insert a thin space (about half the normal thickness) using \, . In math mode, there are also other commands: \. , \: and \; , and one for a negative space: \! .

Very rarely, for example when creating a title page, you might need to add explicit horizontal or vertical space. We can use \hspace and \vspace for that.

Explicit text formatting

We wrote in lesson 3 that most of the time logical structure is preferable. But sometimes you want to make text bold, or italic, or monospaced, etc. There are two types of command for this: ones for short pieces of text, and ones for ‘running’ material.

For short bits of text, we use \textbf , \textit , \textrm , \textsf , \texttt and \textsc .

For running text, we use commands that alter the font setup; the commands here are for example \bfseries and \itshape . Because these don’t ‘stop’, we need to place them in a group if we want to prevent them from applying to the whole document. LaTeX environments are groups, as are table cells, or we can use {...} to make an explicit group.

We can set font size in a similar way; these commands all work on an ongoing basis. The sizes we set are relative: \huge , \large , \normalsize , \small and \footnotesize are common. It’s important to finish a paragraph before changing the font size back; see how we add an explicit \par (paragraph break) here.

Experiment with manual formatting: create a titlepage environment and try inserting different spaces and font changes. What happens when we combine font changes? How does this compare to math mode?

What happens if you change the font size of a large paragraph (try with \tiny then with \huge ) but don’t issue a final \par before closing the group?

How can I change the spacing in my LaTeX document?

To double space a LaTeX document, you should include the line

after your \documentclass line.

Before your \begin{document} command,

will make the text of the whole document double spaced. Footnotes, figures, and tables will still be singlespaced, however. For one-and-a-half spacing, instead use the command

In order to make a part of the text of your document singlespaced, you can put:

at the beginning of the text you want singlespaced, and

at the end.

You can also set the spacing to be something other than doublespaced; for example, if you wanted to have one-and-a-quarter spacing between lines, use the line

before your \begin{document} command, and after the \usepackage{setspace} line.

IS&T Contributions

Documentation and information provided by is&t staff members →.

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• Behind the Scenes

How to Make a Presentation in LaTeX

December 7, 2016 Trudy Firestone 5 Comments

When I was tasked with creating a presentation to share with my co-workers at our weekly tech talk, I chose to use LaTeX. While I briefly considered other tools, like Google Slides or PowerPoint, using LaTeX allowed me to easily separate the styling from my content and create my own theme that I could reuse for all future presentations at Lucid.

What? LaTeX for Presentations?

LaTeX is a typesetting and document creation tool that is often used for creating academic articles due to its ability to display mathematical equations. Beyond that, it has many other capabilities due to a large amount of packages, such as Forest, which I used for laying out sentence trees in a college Linguistics class. One such package, Beamer , allows you to create presentations. While Beamer lacks the simple click and drag functionality of a GUI tool in creating presentations, it makes up for it by automating a large portion of the stylistic work—as long as you like the default styles or are willing to write your own—and offering all the mathematical equations, graphs, and other tools available in LaTeX.

A sample Beamer document:

The Beamer commands are straightforward, and the flow of the presentation is easier to follow than it is in a GUI tool. While you could split the styling from the market using html and css, I enjoy using the Beamer package due to its concise creation of slides. Looking at a LaTeX file for a Beamer presentation is almost like looking at an outline which makes it more closely connected to the content the presentation is trying to convey. Unfortunately, I don’t like the default theme…or any of the other themes .

After lots of searching, however, I was able to create my own theme, lucid. Then, just by uncommenting \usetheme{lucid} , I was able to create a presentation I was pleased with. Only a few weeks ago, I was able to reuse the theme and create a new presentation with all the custom styling that I wanted in much less time than a GUI tool would have required to replicate my original theme.

Building Your Own Beamer Theme

While it’s easy to find documentation on creating a presentation using Beamer , it’s more difficult to locate documentation on building a Beamer theme. Therefore, I’m going to walk through creating a simple Beamer theme with its own title page, header and footer, and styled lists.

The first step in creating a Beamer theme is creating the following four files where “lucid” is the name of our new theme:

• beamerinnerthemelucid.sty
• beamerouterthemelucid.sty
• beamercolorthemelucid.sty
• beamerthemelucid.sty

While it’s not necessary to separate these into four files, it follows the pattern of Beamer’s own themes which allow for mixing and matching different parts of the theme. For instance, if we wanted to use the albatross color theme with the default theme we could replace \usetheme{lucid} in the above sample file like this:

And the output pdf would consist of this:

The three parts of a theme are:

• Inner: Defines the appearance of any items that make up the slides central content, e.g., lists or the title on the title page
• Outer: Defines the appearance of the chrome of the slide, e.g., the title and footer of each slide
• Color: Defines the colors used in various parts of the theme, e.g.,the color for frame titles or the background color

The final file, beamerthemelucid.sty, simply exists to combine all the parts of the theme into the main theme so it can be used without specifying each part of the theme.

beamerthemelucid.sty:

The change to presentation mode at the beginning of the file is added so that the .sty file will match the mode of the presentation .tex file. Beamer automatically converts all files with its document class to presentation mode. The rest of the file simply sets all the portions of the theme to the new lucid theme and then returns the file to the normal mode. Each of the .sty files used to create the theme needs to be put in presentation mode in the same way.

Right now, the theme doesn’t actually change anything. Everything is still using the default theme because we haven’t defined any new styles. Let’s start with the title page. Because the title is part of the inner content of the title page, the definition for its style goes into beamerinnerthemelucid.sty.

I want a title page that’s centered vertically and horizontally like the one in the default theme, but with a bigger font, a different color, and no date. So, let’s add the following to beamerinnerthemelucid.sty between the mode changes:

The \defbeamertemplate command creates a new template where the first argument is the mode, * in this case, the second argument is what the template is for, and the third argument is the name of the new template. To access the template elsewhere, the given name is used, in this case “lucid.” The final part of \defbeamertemplate is where the actual template is defined using arbitrary LaTeX code. In this case, we use common commands for centering and accessed the title and subtitle via \inserttitle and \insertsubtitle . To get the correct colors, we use \usebeamercolor which fetches the correct colors from the color theme based on the element name given, i.e., the name of the color. Similarly, \usebeamerfont fetches the correct font from the font theme, so that you can specify the font separately.

However, the color and the font remain unchanged, so we need to edit the color theme file next. I want white text on a dark background, so we need to change the background color first.

After adding these commands in beamercolorthemelucid.sty, the title page looks just about the way I want it. The background is gray, and the title and subtitle are in a new size and color. However, Beamer’s default links are still in the bottom right hand corner. To remove them, we add the following line to beamerouterthemelucid.sty because the footer is part of the outer theme.

Like \defbeamertemplate , \setbeamertemplate can be used to define a new template. The element that uses the template is immediately set to use the new template rather than being set separately. In this case, the navigation symbols element is set to empty.

Now that the title page looks just the way I want it to, we can move on to the content slides. While they already have the correct background color and are correctly lacking the navigation symbols in the footer, the title and subtitle are the wrong color and lack style.

Because the frame title is part of the outer theme, we add the following to beamerouterthemelucid.sty:

In addition to the now familiar Beamer commands, we use an if statement to differentiate between the cases of when there is and isn’t a subtitle, and we make use of a new package, tikz, which allows the user to create drawings in LaTeX. By using it in the template for the frametitle, we’ve added a rectangle to each frame title in the presentation. We set the color of the rectangle with the Beamer color frametitle-left which the command \usebeamercolor[fg]{frametitle-left} adds to the environment.

The colors and fonts are correctly reading from beamercolorthemelucid.sty, but it hasn’t been updated, so that’s the next step.

The content of the slides is still in the default style, so we turn to beamerinnerthemelucid.sty to modify the template for lists.

Just as \setbeamertemplate can be used to define a new template that is immediately applied, it can also be used to set a template defined by \defbeamertemplate earlier. square is defined by default in the beamer package, and it makes the bullets in an unordered list square.

To change the colors of content and the list items, we update beamercolortheme.sty again.

The last thing missing from our theme is a new footer. We need to add a page number and logo to each page.

Adding the above to beamerouterthemelucid.sty splits the footer in half, putting the page number out of the total number of pages on one side and a logo on the other. lucidsoftware-logo.png has to be included in the same directory for it to compile correctly. The if statement removes the page number from the first page.

Finally, we add the color for the page number to beamercolorthemelucid.sty:

Creating your own LaTeX theme allows for complete customizability, something you have to work very hard to achieve in more conventional presentational tools. It also makes it trivial to reuse the theme, avoiding wasted effort.

Additional References:

• Another Theme Example

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Agile documentation: keeping your team in sync in an agile world, 5 smart strategies to increasing productivity in the workplace, live editing html and css with chrome devtools.

Was doing just that in the ’80s with DCF and Generalised Markup Language.

Styles were called “profiles”. You could roll your own, tailor an existing style or buy one.

The same base document could be formatted for a book, presentation or display.

Likely still used in producing IBM manuals.

So, have you uploaded your theme on CTAN? That’s the TeX-way to share 🙂

Thanks a lot This article helped me a lot to prepare my communication for this week (Stil working on it) Much thanks <3

Thank you a million times, i had a very very incredible experience with your tutorial. I made my own theme and i love it 🙂 I’m going to make a video on YouTube for this beautiful simplistic tex presentation solution. I’ll definitely link to your great tutorial there.

I do agree with all the ideas you have introduced on your post.

They’re really convincing and wll definitely work. Nonetheless, the posts are too brief for starters. May you please lengthen them a bit from subsequent time? Thanks for the post.

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How to use \vspace or \vspace* command in LaTeX?

In LaTeX, the \vspace command is used to insert vertical space between elements within a document. It allows you to adjust the spacing based on your specific needs. Here’s a complete guide on its usage and functionality.

Syntax of \vspace command

Let’s look at the syntax. But, you can use this command in two ways. Which is represented in the syntax below

length : This parameter specifies length of the vertical space you want to insert. You can use various units such as cm , in , pt , em , ex , among others.

* (optional) : If you include an asterisk * after \vspace , LaTeX will attempt to insert the space at desired location. For example, This command is used to insert vertical space that remains unbreakable, even if it falls at the top or bottom of a page.

Use of \vspace command

Spaces are very important to make a document beautiful. There are many commands for representing vertical space, but this is the most commonly used. Let us focus on following example, which will make your concept more clear.

When you compile above LaTeX code, the lipsum package will generate dummy text according to specified paragraph and sentence ranges. And \vspace commands add vertical spaces between the paragraphs or sentences with different lengths like 20px , 30pt , 1.5cm and 1in .

Use Negative value

Negative values with \vspace can be used to reduce space between elements. Let’s see an example of how to implement it between a table and its caption:

In this example, we have used \vspace{-10pt} command right after tabular environment, just before \caption command. Negative value -10pt reduces space between table and caption, making table and caption appear closer together.

Similarly, you can reduce space between other elements by passing negative values.

Inline use in Paragraph

Of course there are optional methods for this. That is, you need to add a newline after the \vspace command, then the paragraph break will occur at the exact point where you want it.

I think this is not the best practice. You can break paragraphs in the middle and use this command independently. Which is done in the first example.

Use of \vspace* command with asterisk optional argument

Before using optional arguments, you need to know why you use optional arguments. Note the following problem,

Where there is a lot of white space between the first element and the top of the page, you want to reduce or increase it. But, if you see the output, you can understand that there is no change in the space. In this case you need to pass the optional argument asterisk.

You can increase the default length in the same way. Which is given below.

Md Jidan Mondal

LaTeX expert with over 10 years of experience in document preparation and typesetting. Specializes in creating professional documents, reports, and presentations using LaTeX.

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Beamer is a powerful and flexible LaTeX class to create great looking presentations. This article outlines the basis steps to making a Beamer slideshow: creating the title page, adding a logo, highlighting important points, making a table of contents and adding effects to the slideshow.

• 1 Introduction
• 2.1 The title page
• 2.2 Creating a table of contents
• 2.3 Adding effects to a presentation
• 3 Highlighting important sentences/words
• 4.1.1 Berkeley theme
• 4.1.2 Copenhagen theme
• 4.1.3 Using a colortheme
• 4.2.1 Font sizes
• 4.2.2 Font types
• 4.3 Columns
• 5 Reference guide
• 6 Further reading

Introduction

A minimal working example of a simple beamer presentation is provided below.

 Open this beamer document in Overleaf

After compilation, a two-page PDF file will be produced. The first page is the titlepage, and the second one contains sample content.

The first statement in the document declares this is a Beamer slideshow: \documentclass{beamer}

The first command after the preamble, \frame{\titlepage} , generates the title page. This page may contain information about the author, institution, event, logo, and so on. See the title page section for a more complete example.

The frame environment creates the second slide, the self-descriptive command \frametitle{Sample frame title} is optional.

It is worth noting that in beamer the basic container is a frame . A frame is not exactly equivalent to a slide, one frame may contain more than one slides. For example, a frame with several bullet points can be set up to produce a new slide to reveal each consecutive bullet point.

Beamer main features

The Beamer class offers some useful features to bring your presentation to life and make it more attractive. The most important ones are listed below.

The title page

There are some more options for the title page than the ones presented in the introduction . The next example is a complete one, most of the commands are optional.

 Open an example of the beamer package in Overleaf

The distribution of each element in the title page depends on the theme, see the Themes subsection for more information. Here is a description of each command:

Creating a table of contents

Usually when you have a long presentation, it's convenient to divide it into sections or even subsections. In this case, you can add a table of contents at the beginning of the document. Here is an example:

As you see, is simple. Inside the frame environment you set the title and add the command \titlepage .

It's also possible to put the table of contents at the beginning of each section and highlight the title of the current section. Just add the code below to the preamble of your L a T e X document:

If you use \AtBeginSubsection[] instead of \AtBeginSection[] , the table of contents will appear at the beginning of each subsection.

Adding effects to a presentation

In the introduction , we saw a simple slide using the \begin{frame} \end{frame} delimiters. It was mentioned that a frame is not equivalent to a slide , and the next example will illustrate why, by adding some effects to the slideshow. In this example, the PDF file produced will contain 4 slides—this is intended to provide a visual effect in the presentation.

 Open this frame in Overleaf (using \usetheme{Madrid} )

In the code there's a list, declared by the \begin{itemize} \end{itemize} commands, and next to each item is a number enclosed in two special characters: < > . This will determine in which slide the element will appear, if you append a - at the end of the number, the item will be shown in that and the subsequent slides of the current frame , otherwise it will appear only in that slide. Check the animation for a better understanding of this.

These effects can be applied to any type of text, not only to the itemize environment. There's a second command whose behaviour is similar, but it's simpler since you don't have to specify the slides where the text will be unveiled.

This code will generate three slides to add a visual effect to the presentation. \pause will prevent the text below this point and above the next \pause declaration to appear in the current slide.

Highlighting important sentences/words

In a presentation is a good practice to highlight the important points to make it easier for your audience to identify the main topic.

If you want to highlight a word or a phrase within a paragraph, the command \alert{} will change the style of the word inside the braces. The way the enclosed text will look depends on the theme you are using.

To highlight a paragraph with concepts, definitions, theorems or examples, the best option is to put it inside a box. There are three types of box, and it's up to you to decide which one better fits in your presentation:

Customizing your presentation

There are some aspects of a Beamer presentation that can be easily customized. For instance, you can set different themes, colours and change the default text layout into a two-column format.

Themes and colorthemes

It's really easy to use a different theme in your slideshow. For example, the Madrid theme (most of the slideshows in this article use this theme) is set by adding the following command to the preamble:

\usetheme{Madrid}

Below are two more examples.

Berkeley theme

You can  open this LaTeX code in Overleaf to explore the Berkeley theme.

Copenhagen theme

You can  open this LaTeX code in Overleaf to explore the Copenhagen theme.

Using a colortheme

A theme can be combined with a colortheme to change the colour used for different elements.

You must put the \usecolortheme statement below the \usetheme command. You can  open this LaTeX code in Overleaf to explore the Madrid theme with the beaver colortheme. For various options, check out the table of screenshots of different themes and colorthemes in the Reference guide below.

You can change several parameters about the fonts. Here we will mention how to resize them and change the type of font used.

The font size, here 17pt , can be passed as a parameter to the beamer class at the beginning of the document preamble: \documentclass[17pt]{beamer} . Below is an example showing the result of using the 17pt font-size option:

Available font sizes are 8pt, 9pt, 10pt, 11pt, 12pt, 14pt, 17pt, 20pt. Default font size is 11pt (which corresponds to 22pt at the full screen mode).

To change the font types in your beamer presentation there are two ways, either you use a font theme or import directly a font from your system. Let's begin with a font theme:

 Open a beamer document using these settings in Overleaf

The \usefonttheme{} is self-descriptive. The available themes are: structurebold, structurebolditalic, structuresmallcapsserif, structureitalicsserif, serif and default.

You can also import font families installed in your system.

The command \usepackage{bookman} imports the bookman family font to be used in the presentation. The available fonts depend on your L a T e X installation, the most common are: mathptmx, helvet, avat, bookman, chancery, charter, culer, mathtime, mathptm, newcent, palatino, and pifont.

Sometimes the information in a presentation looks better in a two-column format. In such cases use the columns environment:

After the frame and frametitle declarations start a new columns environment delimited by the \begin{columns} \end{columns} . You can declare each column's width with the \column{0.5\textwidth} code, a lower number will shrink the width size.

Reference guide

Below is a table with screenshots of the title page and a normal slide in Beamer using different combinations of themes (rows) and colorthemes (columns). To have a complete list of themes and colorthemes see the further reading section for references.

Further reading

For more information, see the full package documentation here . The following resources may also be useful:

• Bold, italics and underlining
• Font sizes, families, and styles
• Text alignment
• Font typefaces
• Inserting Images
• Using colours in LaTeX
• Lengths in LaTeX
• International language support
• TikZ package
• Beamer User's Guide - The beamer class
• Documentation Home
• Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes

Overleaf guides

• Creating a document in Overleaf
• Uploading a project
• Copying a project
• Creating a project from a template
• Using the Overleaf project menu
• Including images in Overleaf
• Exporting your work from Overleaf
• Working offline in Overleaf
• Using Track Changes in Overleaf
• Using bibliographies in Overleaf
• Sharing your work with others
• Using the History feature
• Debugging Compilation timeout errors
• How-to guides
• Guide to Overleaf’s premium features

LaTeX Basics

• Creating your first LaTeX document
• Choosing a LaTeX Compiler
• Paragraphs and new lines

Mathematics

• Mathematical expressions
• Subscripts and superscripts
• Brackets and Parentheses
• Fractions and Binomials
• Aligning equations
• Spacing in math mode
• Integrals, sums and limits
• Display style in math mode
• List of Greek letters and math symbols
• Mathematical fonts
• Using the Symbol Palette in Overleaf

Figures and tables

• Positioning Images and Tables
• Lists of Tables and Figures
• Drawing Diagrams Directly in LaTeX

References and Citations

• Bibliography management with bibtex
• Bibliography management with natbib
• Bibliography management with biblatex
• Bibtex bibliography styles
• Natbib bibliography styles
• Natbib citation styles
• Biblatex bibliography styles
• Biblatex citation styles
• Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using polyglossia and fontspec
• Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using babel and fontspec
• Quotations and quotation marks

Document structure

• Sections and chapters
• Table of contents
• Cross referencing sections, equations and floats
• Nomenclatures
• Management in a large project
• Multi-file LaTeX projects
• Lengths in L a T e X
• Headers and footers
• Page numbering
• Paragraph formatting
• Line breaks and blank spaces
• Page size and margins
• Single sided and double sided documents
• Multiple columns
• Code listing
• Code Highlighting with minted
• Margin notes
• Supporting modern fonts with X Ǝ L a T e X

Presentations

• Environments

Field specific

• Theorems and proofs
• Chemistry formulae
• Feynman diagrams
• Molecular orbital diagrams
• Chess notation
• Knitting patterns
• CircuiTikz package
• Pgfplots package
• Typesetting exams in LaTeX
• Attribute Value Matrices

Class files

• Understanding packages and class files
• List of packages and class files
• Writing your own package
• Writing your own class

Advanced TeX/LaTeX

• In-depth technical articles on TeX/LaTeX

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