CommunityData:Beamer

Getting Basic Templates
First step is to download the basic templates from the git repository:

git clone git://projects.mako.cc/beamer-mako

The path of least resistance will be to clone the repository so that is located as a subdirectory of.

Next, copy or create symlinks so that the following three files are in your path (e.g., in :



Once you have done this, you can use the script to create new presentations like:

new_beamer presentation foo-20150920

This will create a new subdirectory called  with a file called   inside.

Modify/Customize Templates
At the very least, you will need to modify the lines that start with,  , and. Please don't push back changes or patches that include modifications to these lines.

Building Slides and Presenting
The templates assume that you'll be presenting with PDF Presenter Console which is a pretty full featured presenter console written specifically with Beamer in mind. If you run into any trouble, please download and install the latest version of PDFPC from Github as the note functionality we use is not in some released version of Debian and Ubuntu who have lagged behind development and been slow to pull in new patches fixing bugs and adding functionality.

There are three basic ways to build slides that are supported by the makefile in the repository:


 * — Create a double-wide slide that is appropriate for displaying with PDFPC's "notes" feature. Effectively, the left part will be the slide displayed on the projector and the right part will be the notes displayed on your laptop screen. This will require a new version of PDFPC.
 * — Generate only the notes (e.g., for printing out speaker notes)
 * — Generate only the PDF slides which will be appropriate for presenting with a PDF viewer other than PDFPC.

If you want to switch between building notes, slides, or notes only, you will need to run  to "reset" your repository.

When you are ready to present, it should be as simple as:

make pdfpc