Derek's Technical Notes

One may wish to have a certain slide show up repeatedly within the presentation. One common example of this is a highlighted outline:

A popular way of organizing a slide presentation is to have an outline slide, which will appear repeatedly at various times during the presentation. The slide consists of an outline of the talk, listing the major topics. Each time the slide appears, it highlights the title of the section of the presentation which will next be shown. This way the audience can see the "forest" instead of the "trees," i.e. understand how the parts of the talk fit together.

Beamer allows us to automate this process.

One creates the groundwork for an outline in Beamer by using ordinary LaTeX \section, \subsection etc. These will be used to tell Beamer the points in the presentation at which to insert the outline or other kind of recurrent slide. We arrange this as follows, in the outline case:

\AtBeginSection[]
{
 \begin{frame}
     \frametitle{Outline}
     \tableofcontents[currentsection]
 \end{frame}
}

This tells Beamer, "At each point which we've marked with a LaTeX \section command, insert a Beamer frame whose title at the top edge of the slide is `Outline' and which consists of our LaTeX table of contents with the current section being highlighted." (Note: Remember that you may have to run pdflatex more than once in order to get the table of contents.)

If we need to do this instead at the subsection level, we would have

\AtBeginSubsection[]
{
 \begin{frame}
     \frametitle{Outline}
     \tableofcontents[currentsection,currentsubsection]
 \end{frame}
}

Of course, we can set whatever frame title we wish, not just `Outline'. And it's clear that we have can recurrent slides other than outlines, by simply replacing the \tableofcontents command with other text, say a joke we want to keep repeating until people get sick of it. :-)