Beamer

Overview

You can create Beamer (LaTeX/PDF) presentations using the beamer format. Beamer presentations support core presentation features like incremental content and 2-column layouts, and also provide facilities for customizing column layout, specifying frame attributes, and using Beamer themes.

By default, the Beamer format has echo: false and warning: false. As a result, executable code cells in standard Beamer documents won’t show their source or warnings generated. As with other options, you can override this behavior in the document metadata or individually in each executable cell.

See the Beamer format reference for a complete list of all options available for Beamer output.

Creating Slides

In markdown, slides are delineated using headings. For example, here is a simple slide show with two slides (each defined with a level 2 heading (##)):

---
title: "Habits"
author: "John Doe"
format: beamer
---

## Getting up

- Turn off alarm
- Get out of bed

## Going to sleep

- Get in bed
- Count sheep

You can also divide slide shows into sections with title slides using a level 1 header (#). For example:

---
title: "Habits"
author: "John Doe"
format: beamer
---

# In the morning

## Getting up

- Turn off alarm
- Get out of bed

## Breakfast

- Eat eggs
- Drink coffee

# In the evening

## Dinner

- Eat spaghetti
- Drink wine

## Going to sleep

- Get in bed
- Count sheep

Finally, you can also delineate slides using horizontal rules (for example, if you have a slide without a title):

---
title: "Habits"
author: "John Doe"
format: beamer
---

- Turn off alarm
- Get out of bed

---

- Get in bed
- Count sheep

The examples above all use level 2 headings for slides and level 1 headings for sections/title slides. You can customize this using the slide-level option (See the Pandoc documentation on structuring the slide show for additional details).

In Beamer, headings below slide-level will place content inside a block environment:

---
title: "Habits"
author: "John Doe"
format: 
  beamer:
    slide-level: 2
---

## Slide

### Simple block

Content

Add the .alert or .example class to place content inside an alertblock or exampleblock environment respectively:

---
title: "Habits"
author: "John Doe"
format: 
  beamer:
    slide-level: 2
---

## Slide

### Alert block {.alert}

Content

### Example block {.example}

Content

Incremental Lists

By default number and bullet lists within slides are displayed all at once. You can override this globally using the incremental option. For example:

title: "My Presentation"
format:
  beamer:
    incremental: true

You can also explicitly make any list incremental or non-incremental by surrounding it in a div with an explicit class that determines the mode. To make a list incremental do this:

::: {.incremental}

- Eat spaghetti
- Drink wine

:::

To make a list non-incremental do this:

::: {.nonincremental}

- Eat spaghetti
- Drink wine

:::

You can also insert a pause within a slide (keeping the content after the pause hidden) by inserting three dots separated by spaces:

## Slide with a pause

content before the pause

. . .

content after the pause

Note this only works below headers that are creating slides (see Creating slides).

Multiple Columns

To put material in side by side columns, you can use a native div container with class .columns, containing two or more div containers with class .columnand a width attribute:

:::: {.columns}

::: {.column width="40%"}
contents...
:::

::: {.column width="60%"}
contents...
:::

::::

The div containers with classes columns and column can optionally have an align attribute. The class columns can optionally have a totalwidth attribute or an onlytextwidth class.

:::: {.columns align=center totalwidth=8em}

::: {.column width="40%"}
contents...
:::

::: {.column width="60%" align=bottom}
contents...
:::

::::

The align attributes on columns and column can be used with the values top, top-baseline, center and bottom to vertically align the columns. It defaults to top in columns.

The totalwidth attribute limits the width of the columns to the given value.

::::  {.columns align=top .onlytextwidth}

::: {.column width="40%" align=center}
contents...
:::

::: {.column width="60%"}
contents...
:::

::::

The class onlytextwidth sets the totalwidth to \textwidth.

See Section 12.7 of the Beamer User’s Guide for more details.

Beamer Options

Set additional options to change the appearance of PDF slides using beamer:

---
title: "Presentation"
format: 
  beamer: 
    aspectratio: 32
    navigation: horizontal
    theme: AnnArbor
    colortheme: lily
---

The options available are:

Option Description
aspectratio Slide aspect ratio: 43 for 4:3 [default], 169 for 16:9, 1610 for 16:10, 149 for 14:9, 141 for 1.41:1, 54 for 5:4, 32 for 3:2
beamerarticle Produce an article from Beamer slides
beameroption Extra beamer options provided to \setbeameroption{}
institute Author affiliations: can be a list when there are multiple authors
logo Logo image for slides
navigation Controls navigation symbols (default is empty for no navigation symbols; other valid values are frame, vertical, and horizontal)
section-titles Enables “title pages” for new sections (default is true)
theme, colortheme, fonttheme, innertheme, outertheme Beamer themes
themeoptions Options for LaTeX beamer themes (a list)
titlegraphic Image for title slide

Frame Attributes

Sometimes it is necessary to add the LaTeX [fragile] option to a frame in beamer (for example, when using the minted environment). This can be forced by adding the fragile class to the heading introducing the slide:

# Fragile slide {.fragile}

All of the other frame attributes described in Section 8.1 of the Beamer User’s Guide may also be used: allowdisplaybreaks, allowframebreaks, b, c, t, environment, label, plain, shrink, standout, noframenumbering.

Background Images

To provide a common background image for all slides in a Beamer presentation, use the background-image format option. For example:

---
format:
  beamer:
    background-image: background.png
---