LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system that produces beautiful documents. Beamer is a popular package for LaTeX for creating presentation slides. Beamer has the ability to produce different document types from the same LaTeX source files. It allows you to mark sections to appear in the slides only, book only, or both. See the Beamer user guide for more information.

A common task educators face is to produce lecture notes and slides for classes they teach, a stereotypical use case for this sort of setup. However, configuring such a system can be time consuming and come with a learning curve.

To help streamline the process so that you can start producing content faster, I created a template with an accompanying Makefile to make it easier to setup and use.

Pre-requisites

You will need to have LaTeX installed on your system, as well as the beamer package. Optionally, if you wish to make use of the build commands, you will also need the Make tool installed on your system (commonly found on Linux and MacOS systems).

Where do I get it?

You can download the files from https://github.com/tuanchien/beamer-slide-book-builder

How do I use it?

It’s recommended that you compile the readme.tex file for a full set of instructions. If you already have the Make tool installed then type:

make readme

It will produce the readme.pdf file in the same directory. If you do not have Make then use your favourite LaTeX IDE to do this.

It contains a small set of instructions to help familiarise you with the system quickly.

Once you have written your content, if you have Make installed, it’s as easy as typing

make

into the terminal in your project directory to produce the notes, slides, and references.

Example slides and notes

Slides

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Notes

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Happy writing!

– Banner photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash