# I want a slide deck as dense as a chalk board in a real lecture. How do I get Beamer-style overlays without Beamer? [closed]

I've decided I'm fed up with the standard Powerpoint-esque slide decks and want to instead produce slides for my math talks that look like what I might produce giving a "chalk talk". In particular, I'm imagining much more dense text, probably in two columns given the aspect ratio of projectors nowadays, a much smaller font, but also slides staying up much longer than is typical of slides produced in the Powerpoint style.

I almost have exactly what I want simply using the amsart documentclass, two columns, and some geometry package magic to make the page the same size as in Beamer and to get rid of headers/footers/etc. In particular, a massive improvement over using, say the beamer column mechanism is that I don't need to solve the problem of laying out the text across slides or even within. I get to introduce theorems, definitions, examples, equations, etc., and latex naturally handles the problem of splitting up this all into discrete slides because the slides are actually just pages.

What I have lost, though, is the ability to do overlays/build-ins. It's very daunting to the modern audience to be faced, all of a sudden, with a large, dense, screen of text. I feel what I need, at a minimum, is something akin to the \pause functionality in beamer. I'd be perfectly willing to be forced to introduce \marks to tell such a \pause function where to "rewind", although I'd like something as light weight as possible.

I've started reading up on TeX but I have nowhere near the ninja skills to pull this off. Any ideas out there for how to get started?

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## closed as not a real question by egreg, Joseph Wright♦Feb 2 '13 at 22:21

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It's not clear whether you want a beamer presentation or an article as the final product. For example, it's the opposite of the presentation rules of thumb to fill the slide with text. –  percusse Sep 16 '12 at 23:39
You've made two points here: (Re: beamer or article) I'd be happy with either, but a beamer solution should not require that I layout the text manually into columns or manually decide how to split text across slides. An article solution needs to provide me with some means of doing overlays. (Re: against rules of thumb) I've decided to reject these rules of thumb, but this is my stackexchange post, so I get to pose whatever I like, don't I? ;) –  Daniel Roy Sep 17 '12 at 1:44
I guess it would be more easy to teach beamer the dense layout than to teach overlay commands to article. The multicol package might be a good start to get dense columns. Splitting across slides can be realized with beamers allowframesplit (which, however, does not work together with overlays). –  Daniel Sep 17 '12 at 5:43
Sure, no objection about that but if it's going to be article then why do you need overlay methods is the part that eludes me. –  percusse Sep 17 '12 at 7:12
(re: percusse) It's a presentation, written without regard for slide boundaries (i.e., like an article). (re: Daniel) I thought that might be the case, but perhaps there's a way to get a simple notion of overlay implemented. –  Daniel Roy Sep 17 '12 at 13:48