Create Slides using Latex

We can use the power of latex to generate nice-looking slides for presentation. In this article, I am going to write my experience on how can we create slides using latex. I am using the Beamer document for that purpose, which is a popular template for presentation.

Preparation

We need latex to be installed in our system and install the package Beamer and other additional packages required. I have prepared a docker image that has latex preinstalled, including additional useful packages (texlive-full).

The latex template can be downloaded/cloned from

https://github.com/krishna444/LatexTemplate

After checkout, we can continue working on this project.

Implementation

The PDF file is generated using the following command. The MAIN_FILE is the tex file that needs to be compiled to generate the PDF file.

File: BuildLatex.sh

#!/bin/bash
IMAGE=krishna444/latex:debian
MAIN_FILE=source/Sample.tex
OUTPUT_DIR=output
mkdir -p $OUTPUT_DIR
COMMANDS="pdflatex -output-directory=$OUTPUT_DIR $MAIN_FILE"
sudo docker run --rm -it --net=none -v $PWD:/source  $IMAGE /bin/bash -c "$COMMANDS"
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER $OUTPUT_DIR

Sample latex file to generate slides

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{comment}
%set background
\setbeamertemplate{background}{\includegraphics[width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight]{source/images/background.png}}
%align title on the center
\setbeamertemplate{frametitle}[default][center]
%skip title 0.3cm vertically.
\addtobeamertemplate{frametitle}{\vskip 0.3cm}{}
%lots of themes available
\usetheme{Hannover}
%\usetheme{Boadilla}
%\usetheme{Rochester}
%\usetheme{PaloAlto}
%\usetheme{Madrid}
%title
\title{COTS : Introduction}
%\subtitle{Lets experiment on COTS}
\author{Prepared by: Krishna Paudel}
\institute{Institute}
\date{\today}
\begin{document}
%start adding frames where
\begin{frame}
    \titlepage
\end{frame}

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

%define styles for xml or json
\lstdefinestyle{XMLStyle}{
    language=XML,
    basicstyle=\ttfamily\small,
    commentstyle=\color{blue},
    keywordstyle=\color{red},
    stringstyle=\color{purple},
    frame=single,
    breaklines=true,
    breakatwhitespace=true,
    tabsize=2,
}

\lstdefinestyle{json}{
  basicstyle=\small\ttfamily,
  %numbers=left,
  numberstyle=\tiny,
  stepnumber=1,
  numbersep=8pt,
  showstringspaces=false,
  breaklines=true,
  frame=single,
  backgroundcolor=\color{gray!10},
  morestring=[b]`,
  morestring=[b]',
  stringstyle=\color{blue},
  commentstyle=\color{olive},
  keywordstyle=\color{purple},
}

\begin{comment}
Comments can be placed here, latex will simply ignore these. 
\end{comment}
% Introduction Section (displayed in table of content)
\section{Introduction}
\subsection{This is introduction}
\begin{frame}
    \frametitle{Title}
    \begin{itemize}
        \item item1
        \item item2
        \item item3 
        \item item4        
    \end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\section{Background}
%include some external tex file
\input{source/frames/background.tex}
.
.
.
/end{document}

Some useful tips:

\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm,scale=0.5]{source/images/block-diagram.png}

\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\href{https://sample.com}{\color{blue}{Link}}

\begin{columns}[t]
    \column{.5\textwidth}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=5cm,height=7cm]{image1.png}    
    \column{.5\textwidth}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=6cm,height=7cm]{image2.png}    
    \end{columns}

\begin{frame}[fragile]

\begin{frame}[fragile]
\begin{lstlisting}[style=XMLStyle]
     <xml></xml>
\end{lstlisting}    

\centering
    \begin{table}
        \resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{
        \begin{tabular}{|l|l|}
            \hline
            \textbf{Name} & \textbf{Description} \\
            \hline
            Row 1 & \textit{This is Row 1} \\
            Row 2 & \textit{This is Row 2} \\             
            \hline
        \end{tabular}
        }
        \caption{Table Title}
    \end{table}

\begin{multicols}{2}   
[Content]
\end{multicols}

\usepackage{animate}
\rotatebox{5}{\textbf{\LARGE Thank YOU!}}    %rotate by 5 degrees
\rotatebox{15}{\textbf{\LARGE Thank YOU!}}   %rotate by 15 degrees
\rotatebox{25}{\textbf{\LARGE Thank YOU!}}   %rotate by 25 degrees
\rotatebox{45}{\textbf{\LARGE Thank YOU!}}   %rotate by 45 degrees