Automatically generate section title slides in beamer?

Question

Is there a way to get beamer to automatically stick in a slide with a centered title whenever I use \section{title} or \subsection{title} or (heaven forbid) \subsubsection{title}? I'm hoping some package or command will do this for every time one of these commands is used, but I would settle for a \maketitle type command that would work within each section or subsection.

Answer 1

You can use the macros \AtBeginSection, \AtBeginSubsection and \AtBeginSubsubsection to automatically execute something at the beginning of each (sub)(sub)section. To create a title frame, beamer offers the commands \sectionpage and \subsectionpage. \subsubsectionpage is missing by default, but you can easily define it yourself:

\documentclass{beamer}

\usetheme{Ilmenau}

% Add support for \subsubsectionpage
\def\subsubsectionname{\translate{Subsubsection}}
\def\insertsubsubsectionnumber{\arabic{subsubsection}}
\setbeamertemplate{subsubsection page}
{
  \begin{centering}
    {\usebeamerfont{subsubsection name}\usebeamercolor[fg]{subsubsection name}\subsubsectionname~\insertsubsubsectionnumber}
    \vskip1em\par
    \begin{beamercolorbox}[sep=4pt,center]{part title}
      \usebeamerfont{subsubsection title}\insertsubsubsection\par
    \end{beamercolorbox}
  \end{centering}
}
\def\subsubsectionpage{\usebeamertemplate*{subsubsection page}}

\AtBeginSection{\frame{\sectionpage}}
\AtBeginSubsection{\frame{\subsectionpage}}
\AtBeginSubsubsection{\frame{\subsubsectionpage}}

\begin{document}
\section{Section 1}
\subsection{Subsection 1}
\frame{}\frame{}
\subsection{Subsection 2}
\subsubsection{Subsubsection 1}
\frame{}
\section{Section 2}
\frame{}
\end{document}