I Hate Beamer

An Undistinguished Display of Frustration

UDLS @ UBC CS

Victor Sanches Portella

Please, do interrupt!

And there won't be any bread or rice

What is Beamer?

How everything started

What is LaTeX?

Typesetting system designed by Donal Knuth

"My book looks awful. Hold my beer"

Focus on formatting

"Set of macros" built on top of TeX

Focus on content

Widely used in papers and books from STEM and other fields

Built-in math typesetting

What is LaTeX?

\documentclass{article}

\title{Your Paper}
\author{You}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\begin{abstract}
Your abstract.
\end{abstract}

\section{Introduction}

Hello world!

\end{document}

What is LaTeX?

What is Beamer?

Beamer is a document class for LaTeX to create slides (and posters)

Very well documented

Plenty of themes and features

Actively mantained

Many examples of good slide decks

LaTeX focuses on content by design

We (should) want to control format in slides

Why do I Hate it?

It is about who it makes us be

#1: Used For the Wrong Reasons

" I want to use math in my presentations"

\int \mathrm{Not~a~good~}dx = \pi \cdot \mathrm{Reason} + C

"I will live in the sea because I want to have fish"

"I am used to LaTeX"

The work you need to make it look decent is not worth it

"I can Copy & Paste stuff from my paper"

#2: Too Standardized

Beamer slide decks look awfully identical

Even with different themes

In a conference, you want to be memorable

Hard to make it look good

I haven't watched The Office

Me in a conference

#3: Visual Tweaks are Hard

LaTeX is built for users to focus on content

Changes in format are possible, but not the main use case

Visual aids need to be made outside LaTeX

This incentivizes people to not use visual aids

"OoOoOoH, WhAt AbOuT TikZ?"

#3.5: TikZ is Pain

Looks easy enough, right?

\begin{tikzpicture}[
roundnode/.style={circle, draw=green!60, fill=green!5, very thick, minimum size=7mm},
squarednode/.style={rectangle, draw=red!60, fill=red!5, very thick, minimum size=5mm},
]
%Nodes
\node[squarednode]      (maintopic)                              {2};
\node[roundnode]        (uppercircle)       [above=of maintopic] {1};
\node[squarednode]      (rightsquare)       [right=of maintopic] {3};
\node[roundnode]        (lowercircle)       [below=of maintopic] {4};

%Lines
\draw[->] (uppercircle.south) -- (maintopic.north);
\draw[->] (maintopic.east) -- (rightsquare.west);
\draw[->] (rightsquare.south) .. controls +(down:7mm) and +(right:7mm) .. (lowercircle.east);
\end{tikzpicture}

This is the f***ing beginners tutorial