Org To Beamer

One of the easiest and most popular methods of making presentation slides is reveal.js, which exports your slides as HTML so that you can display them with any browser. Sometimes, though, you want to produce your slides as PDFs and for that we have Beamer, a LaTeX package (documentation). Unless you’re reasonably proficient with LaTeX, Beamer can seem a little intimidating. Fortunately, Emacs, as usual, has us covered.

You can easily produce Beamer slides directly from Org mode and Laura Viglioni has a nice post on how to do that and, specifically, how to use custom themes. Her post, Installing LaTeX themes on your machine/Emacs org-mode, is mostly about how and where to install custom Beamer themes if you’re tired of the default choices but it also shows a complete example in both Org and the finished result.

One thing I didn’t know about is kpsewhich, which can display paths and variable values. There’s a man page and some fairly detailed help if you’re not familiar with it but all you need to know for Beamer is the value of TEXMFHOME, which you can find with

kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFHOME

In any event, if you’re interested in using Beamer without dealing with LaTeX, take a look at Viglioni’s post.

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