Disabling beamer animations easily

Question

I'm writing a presentation for a conference with beamer. I'm using \pause commands in order to show the contents one piece at a time, but it's really annoying having to scroll through so much pages while I'm writing slides. After a little bit (read: lot of) googling, I found about the handout documentclass option, that seems to do just what I was looking for.

My question is: since I would like to have pauses in the presentation before every list item and before every block in general, is there a way to tell beamer to automatically do this, please? With my current solution it's easy to enable/disable slides animations, but it's quite a nuisance having to manually add \pause everywhere.

Answer 1

I guess there are at least three alternatives for your problem, the four slides in the following example all do the same:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Darmstadt}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}
    \item first one
        \pause
    \item second one
        \pause
    \item third one
        \pause
    \item fourth one
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}
    \item<1-> first one
    \item<2-> second one
    \item<3-> third one
    \item<4-> fourth one
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}
    \item<+-> first one
    \item<+-> second one
    \item<+-> third one
    \item<+-> fourth one
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}[<+->]
    \item first one
    \item second one
    \item third one
    \item fourth one
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\end{document}

---

• the first one is you solution
• the second one tells at which slides to appear, <3-> meaning all starting from the third one
• the third one is used to increase the counter beamerpause (=1 at beginning of frame) by one at each encounter
• the fourth one (probably the one you would go for) sets the "increase beamerpause" as a default behaviour for all list items

---

Edit 1: You can also set the behaviour from the fourth example as general. All frames following \beamerdefaultoverlayspecification{<+->} will set pauses for every actionenv environment and every \item. To be in effect globally, you need to set this outside of a frame, e.g. as the first line after \begin{document}, before the first frame.