I understand that a variety of beamer commands can help with displaying parts of a page on consecutive slides (such as \uncover, \only, etc.) so I can manage the effect that I want manually. but I am wondering whether it can be automated: is there a way to redefine \pause so that everything before the pause will automatically fade (to gray) to highlight the new segment only?
Regards, /iaw
PS: Till Tantau must be a genius! TikZ and Beamer are each incredible pieces of work.
I would discourage using \pause, instead use \beamerdefaultoverlayspecification{<+>}. That is more powerful and less typing effort, see beamer package documentation page 89.
\documentclass{beamer}
\setbeamercovered{transparent}% see beamer documentation p 190
\beamerdefaultoverlayspecification{<+>}% see beamer documentation p 89
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}
\item abc
\item def
\item ghi
\item jkl
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}
\end{document}
If you really need to redefine \pause, for example because you want to use \tableofcontents[pausesections] which is internally using \pause, see my answer here.
\setbeamercovered{still covered={\opaqueness<1->{0}}, again covered={\opaqueness<1->{50}}}that should work with incremental overlays, but I dont think it will work with pause. – Matt Jun 25 '15 at 14:44