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I like Beamer and I use it but I wanted to check if there other classes for slides or presentation purposes to consider seriously when starting to write a presentation.

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Under the topic Presentation Slides at The TeX Catalogue Online you will find some of them, beamer included.

Another list is provided at Screen Presentations Tools where Michael Wiedmann compares several tools and not only pdf oriented.

But, probably, the most updated list can be found at CTAN (Comprehensive TEX Archive Network) under topic Presentation.

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    Please try to avoid "here" links. See also Can we have some linking etiquette and guidelines? on meta. – Martin Scharrer♦ Apr 7 '11 at 10:32
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    @Martin: You are right, 'here' doesn't provide too much information. I've reedited the answer. – Ignasi Apr 7 '11 at 14:39
  • The first two links are broken. – Tyson Williams Nov 15 '12 at 14:20
  • @TysonWilliams: I've changed them to point to CTAN mirror services. I hope they work now. – Ignasi Nov 15 '12 at 15:04
  • They appear to be broken again now. – Nagel Oct 19 '18 at 12:42
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There is also Lecturer which makes a pretty clean impression on me. Problem might be that it relies on genuine PDF features for the transition effects and overlays and thus needs a really compliant PDF viewer, which might mean that only Adobe Reader will do a good job. Notably, Preview.app won’t work in many cases. Still, if you only use the basic transitions, it may be fine with many viewers.

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    Thanks for this. Anyway I do not think that using fancy screen transitions is a good idea when presenting mathematics or science. – ogerard Apr 10 '11 at 22:18
  • It’s not only fancy transitions which are affected by this but also some overlays which can be helpful in all sorts of presentations. – Debilski Apr 11 '11 at 14:16
  • @Debilski yes, but other packages do not need special PDF features to introduce overlays. – yo' Nov 15 '12 at 20:15
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If you use KOMA-Script for anything else beside presentations, have a look at this short article in the PracTeX-Journal: http://tug.org/pracjourn/2010-2/hofert.html

»Abstract: In this article, we show how scientific presentations can be created based on the KOMA-Script document class scrartcl. The main advantage of the suggested approach is that the presentation slides allow for easy copy-and-paste of content from other LaTeX documents such as research papers or handouts. Using this approach, presentation slides are quickly generated, without the author having to learn how to use other LaTeX presentation packages. Additionally, in contrast to the rather overused templates of the more common presentation packages, the slides can be individually created and thus tailored to the topic of the presentation.«

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    It is an interesting alternative, however, I don't second "quick and easy conversion" from an article to a presentation. Their principles are very different, and this sort of option only suggest people to make their slides like a real paper (or convert it from the paper), result of which can be really catastrophic (people produce long ugly slides even without this). – yo' Nov 15 '12 at 20:12
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Context works pretty well as is for presentations; I think it's fairly comparable to Beamer/Tikz overall. See Presentations on the Context wiki.

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  • ConTeXt is comparable in terms of features, but not the interface. The simpleslides module provides some additional pre-built styles, but is meant for simple presentations; nothing as comprehensive as beamer. – Aditya Apr 7 '11 at 15:04
  • @Aditya: Right. Beamer gives a nice interface to dynamic effects like overlays and transitions that are comparatively tricky in Context. But a lot of the code in Beamer is devoted to redefining Latex commands that I think are already taken care of in Context. – Charles Stewart Apr 8 '11 at 9:40
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I am using FoilTeX for many years to create my teaching notes and slides. It is a plain no-nonsens package. If you want to make printouts of the presentation it do not use up an ink cartridge every time :-)

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