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\documentclass{beamer}

LaTeX Beamer Presentation

Create professional academic slides with LaTeX Beamer. Covers frame structure, themes, math equations, overlay animations, and a fully working 5-slide demo ready to compile in your browser.

View full template

\begin{frame}

Basic frame structure

Each slide is a frameenvironment. Inside you can use any LaTeX — paragraphs, itemize, columns, equations, and Beamer's block environments.

Frame skeleton
\begin{frame}{Your Slide Title}

  % Plain text paragraph
  Beamer compiles your \LaTeX{} source to a PDF slide deck.
  Each \texttt{frame} environment produces one slide.

  \bigskip

  % Bullet list
  \begin{itemize}
    \item First bullet point
    \item Second bullet point
    \item Third bullet point — with \textbf{bold} or \emph{italic}
  \end{itemize}

  \bigskip

  % Two columns
  \begin{columns}[T]
    \column{0.5\textwidth}
      Left column content here.
    \column{0.5\textwidth}
      Right column content here.
  \end{columns}

\end{frame}

\usetheme{ThemeName}

Beamer themes overview

Beamer ships with 26 built-in themes. Here are the most useful ones and when to choose each. Set them with \usetheme{ThemeName}.

MadridConference

Header bar with section navigation. Classic academic conference look. Works well with seahorse or dolphin color theme.

BerlinAcademic

Section tree in header, footer with author, title, and page number. High information density for longer presentations.

WarsawModern

Gradient header bar with rounded block environments. Polished and modern-looking compared to older Beamer defaults.

CambridgeUSCorporate

Red accent, clean sans-serif typography. Minimal navigation clutter. Good for corporate or industry talks.

MetropolisMinimal

Third-party theme (requires installation). Flat design, large fonts, progress bar footer. Extremely popular on arXiv slides.

defaultBare metal

No decoration — plain white slides. Ideal for full-control designs where you build your own look with tikz or custom commands.

\begin{equation}

Math in Beamer slides

Beamer fully supports amsmath. Use block, alertblock, and exampleblock to frame key equations and definitions.

Math frame with block environments
\begin{frame}{Self-Attention Equation}

  Attention maps each token to a weighted sum of all others:
  \begin{equation}
    \text{Attention}(Q, K, V)
      = \text{softmax}\!\left(\frac{QK^\top}{\sqrt{d_k}}\right) V
  \end{equation}

  \begin{block}{Complexity note}
    Standard self-attention is $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ in sequence
    length~$n$. Our approach reduces this to $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$.
  \end{block}

  \begin{alertblock}{Important}
    Large $d_k$ causes vanishing gradients in the softmax —
    hence the $\sqrt{d_k}$ scaling factor.
  \end{alertblock}

  \begin{exampleblock}{Example}
    For $n = 512$, $d_k = 64$: scaling factor $= 8$.
  \end{exampleblock}

\end{frame}
block

Neutral framed box with custom title

alertblock

Red-accent box for warnings or key results

exampleblock

Green-accent box for examples

\pause

Overlay & animation commands

Beamer's overlay system lets you reveal content step by step within a single frame. A frame with 3 overlay steps produces 3 PDF pages.

\pause

Split frame at this point — most common

\item<2->

Show item from overlay 2 onwards

\only<3>

Show content only on overlay 3

\uncover<2->

Reserve space; reveal from overlay 2

\\pause, \\only, \\uncover, \\alert overlay examples
% \pause — reveal each item one at a time
\begin{frame}{Incremental List}
  \begin{itemize}
    \item<1-> Always visible from slide 1
    \item<2-> Appears on slide 2
    \item<3-> Appears on slide 3
  \end{itemize}
\end{frame}

% \only — content shown on specific slides only
\begin{frame}{Conditional Content}
  \only<1>{This text is shown on the first overlay only.}
  \only<2>{This text replaces it on the second overlay.}

  \only<2>{
    \begin{alertblock}{Key Takeaway}
      \only{} is useful for revealing conclusions dramatically.
    \end{alertblock}
  }
\end{frame}

% \uncover — space is always reserved; content revealed progressively
\begin{frame}{Reserved Space}
  Line A is always here.\\
  \uncover<2->{Line B appears on slide 2 but its space was reserved.}\\
  \uncover<3->{Line C appears on slide 3.}
\end{frame}

% \alert — highlight text on a specific overlay
\begin{frame}{Highlighting}
  The \alert<2>{attention mechanism} (slide 2 highlight)
  drives modern NLP architectures.
\end{frame}

\include{presentation}

Complete Beamer template

A 5-frame presentation covering a full research talk: title, introduction with overlays, math with blocks, results table, and conclusion. Compiles with pdfLaTeX.

presentation.tex
\documentclass[aspectratio=169, 12pt]{beamer}

% ---- Theme & colours ----
\usetheme{Madrid}
\usecolortheme{seahorse}
\usefonttheme{professionalfonts}

% ---- Encoding ----
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

% ---- Math ----
\usepackage{amsmath, amssymb}

% ---- Graphics ----
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{tikz}

% ---- Metadata ----
\title{Deep Learning for NLP}
\subtitle{A Gentle Introduction}
\author{Jane Researcher}
\institute{University of Example}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}

% ---- Title frame ----
\begin{frame}
  \titlepage
\end{frame}

% ---- Table of contents ----
\begin{frame}{Outline}
  \tableofcontents
\end{frame}

% ---- Section 1 ----
\section{Introduction}

\begin{frame}{What is Deep Learning?}
  Deep learning trains multi-layer neural networks to learn
  hierarchical representations from data.

  \bigskip
  \textbf{Key building blocks:}
  \begin{itemize}
    \item<1-> Linear layers: $\mathbf{y} = W\mathbf{x} + \mathbf{b}$
    \item<2-> Activation functions: ReLU, sigmoid, GELU
    \item<3-> Optimisation: stochastic gradient descent
  \end{itemize}
\end{frame}

% ---- Section 2 ----
\section{Attention Mechanism}

\begin{frame}{Self-Attention}
  Attention maps each token to a weighted sum of all others:
  \begin{equation}
    \text{Attention}(Q, K, V)
      = \text{softmax}\!\left(\frac{QK^\top}{\sqrt{d_k}}\right) V
  \end{equation}

  \pause

  \begin{block}{Complexity}
    Standard self-attention is $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ in sequence length $n$.
  \end{block}
\end{frame}

% ---- Section 3 ----
\section{Results}

\begin{frame}{Benchmark Results}
  \begin{center}
    \begin{tabular}{lcc}
      \toprule
      Model        & BLEU & ROUGE-L \\
      \midrule
      Baseline     & 28.4 & 41.2 \\
      Transformer  & 41.0 & 52.3 \\
      \textbf{Ours} & \textbf{44.2} & \textbf{55.1} \\
      \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}
  \end{center}

  \only<2>{
    \begin{alertblock}{Key Takeaway}
      Our model improves BLEU by 3.2 points over the transformer baseline.
    \end{alertblock}
  }
\end{frame}

% ---- Conclusion ----
\begin{frame}{Conclusion}
  \begin{itemize}
    \item Introduced a sub-quadratic attention mechanism
    \item Demonstrated gains on BLEU and ROUGE benchmarks
    \item Code available at \texttt{github.com/example/repo}
  \end{itemize}

  \bigskip
  \centering
  \Large\textbf{Thank you!}\\[6pt]
  \normalsize\texttt{[email protected]}
\end{frame}

\end{document}

Try the 5-slide demo

The complete Beamer presentation — with overlays, math blocks, and a results table — is pre-loaded and ready to compile. No installation needed.

\section{FAQ}

Frequently asked questions

What aspect ratio should I use for Beamer?

Use aspectratio=169 (16:9) for modern widescreen displays and conference projectors. Use aspectratio=43 (4:3) only if your venue explicitly requires it. Set the aspect ratio in the \documentclass options: \documentclass[aspectratio=169]{beamer}.

How do I change the Beamer theme and colors?

Use \usetheme{ThemeName} and \usecolortheme{ColorName} in the preamble. Themes control the layout (header, footer, sidebar) while color themes apply a color scheme. Popular combinations: Madrid + seahorse, Berlin + beaver, Warsaw + orchid. You can also define custom colors with \definecolor.

How do overlays and \pause work in Beamer?

\pause is the simplest overlay — it splits a frame into sub-slides, revealing content sequentially. For fine-grained control, use overlay specifications like \item<2-> (visible from slide 2), \only<3>{…} (shown only on slide 3), and \uncover<2->{…} (space reserved, content revealed on slide 2+).

Can I put equations in Beamer slides?

Yes — Beamer fully supports amsmath. Use equation, align, and gather environments as normal. For very wide equations in narrow slides, consider using split or multline. Beamer's block, alertblock, and exampleblock environments are useful for framing key equations.

How do I make two-column slides?

Use the columns environment: \begin{columns}[T] \column{0.5\textwidth} left content \column{0.5\textwidth} right content \end{columns}. The [T] option aligns column tops. You can also use minipage if you need more control over spacing.

My Beamer PDF has too many pages — how do I hide overlay frames?

When sharing PDFs for reading (not presenting), use \documentclass[handout]{beamer}. This collapses all overlays of each frame into a single page. Combine with the pgfpages package to print 2-up or 4-up handouts: \pgfpagesuselayout{2 on 1}[a4paper].

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