Daily Archives: 20 November 2020

Latex/Beamer: Do you type too many notes?

 in Latex  tagged beamer / Latex / notes / template by

We most certainly do!

For that reason we needed to make the template for the notes as simple as possible. To avoid developing our own template for the notes page, we used one of the three basic predefined templates named plain.

Using plain we got an empty slide in the notes page which allowed us to add a lot more content!

The basic 3 template options for the notes slide are the following

  1. default The default template shows the last slide in the upper right corner and some information that should help you match a note page to the slide that is currently shown (e.g. title of section and subsection).
  2. compress The option produces an output that is similar to the default, it fits more content onto each note page at the price of legibility.
  3. plain An empty page to add notes to.

Usage example:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{pgfpages}
\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right}
\setbeamertemplate{note page}[default]
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
Some content.
\note{Some note for the content}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Beamer: Reasons to avoid allowframebreaks

 in Latex  tagged allowframebreaks by

Recently we were relying too much on allowframebreaks to automatically split a frame to multiple slides.

We were trying to make our notes spread across all slides that were automatically generated. After reading the Beamer User Guide, we learned a couple of new things.

A) Once you use allowframebreaks then you cannot use overlays.

B) Any notes for the frame created using the \note command will be inserted after the first page of the frame and will not be split among other pages.

C) We should refrain from using the option allowframebreaks except for long bibliographies (which by the way should be avoided anyway in presentations).

D) The use of this option is evil ^___^ as it promotes bad design and lack of thought when creating a presentation.

Anyway, back to the drawing board!