including several beamer presentations as minimized images in a frame

Question

I want to have a frame in such a way that it contains, say, 4 small images. Each one of these images is the first frame of a beamer presentation, so that when I click to the small image it zooms to full screen, appearing the beamer presentation. Once this presentation is finished, it minimizes to the small image, so then I can proceed by clicking the 2nd small image and start with the 2nd beamer presentation, and so on...is it possible to get such frame of images that are beamer presentations??.

Answer 1

Sure it is possible: the idea is quite simple: (in the following example, the four presentations will be called beamer-1.pdf, beamer-2.pdf, beamer-3.pdf and beamer-4.pdf).

All you have to do is to use create the "main" presentation using the standard \includegraphics command (with appropriate settings) to include the four first pages using the page=1 option (to extract the first page of each presentation), and \href to turn the images into hyperlinks. So, the general command would look something like (in the example below I also added a frame with \fbox, but this is optional).

\href{beamer-1.pdf}{\includegraphics[page=1,width=.8\linewidth]{beamer-1}}

A complete example:

\documentclass{beamer}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\frametitle{Four presentations}
\begin{minipage}[c][0.45\textheight][t]{.45\textwidth}
\centering
\fbox{\href{beamer-1.pdf}{\includegraphics[page=1,width=.8\linewidth]{beamer-1}}}
\end{minipage}\hfill
\begin{minipage}[c][0.45\textheight][t]{.45\textwidth}
\centering
\fbox{\href{beamer-1.pdf}{\includegraphics[page=1,width=.8\linewidth]{beamer-2}}}
\end{minipage}\par
\begin{minipage}[c][0.45\textheight][t]{.45\textwidth}
\centering
\fbox{\href{beamer-1.pdf}{\includegraphics[page=1,width=.8\linewidth]{beamer-3}}}
\end{minipage}\hfill
\begin{minipage}[c][0.45\textheight][t]{.45\textwidth}
\centering
\fbox{\href{beamer-1.pdf}{\includegraphics[page=1,width=.8\linewidth]{beamer-4}}}
\end{minipage}
\end{frame}

\end{document}

This produces:

where each image is hyperlinked to the corresponding presentation.

For completeness, here are the four documents used to produce the four PDFs:

beamer1.tex:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{PaloAlto}

\title{First presentation}
\author{The Author}
\institute{The Institute}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\maketitle
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
Test frame
\end{frame}

\end{document}

beamer2.tex:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{CambridgeUS}

\title{Second presentation}
\author{The Buthor}
\institute{The Institute}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\maketitle
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
Test frame
\end{frame}

\end{document}

beamer3.tex:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Boadilla}

\title{Third presentation}
\author{The Cuthor}
\institute{The Institute}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\maketitle
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
Test frame
\end{frame}

\end{document}

beamer4.tex:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Hannover}

\title{Fourth presentation}
\author{The Duthor}
\institute{The Institute}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\maketitle
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
Test frame
\end{frame}

\end{document}

The possibility to return to the main presentation can be achieved using a beamer button in the subsidiary presentations and the \hyperlink, \hypertarget mechanism.