mikeevmm / nobeamer

Minimalist presentations with plain TeX.

nobeamer

(Extended) Plain TeX package to make no-nonsense presentations, if you insist on using TeX.

Why nobeamer

Beamer is dreadful. It looks bad, introduces a lot of visual clutter into the presentation, and it's coercing a typesetting tool (LaTeX) into doing slides, which it wasn't made for. LaTeX itself greatly complicates TeX, though in exchange for useful features. PowerPoint doesn't have a good Linux equivalent.

(If you disagree with any of the above, you might find nobeamer silly. I respect your opinion. Otherwise, you might like nobeamer; or you might've written your own alternative already.)

nobeamer was written for when TeX suffices: write some content, set some sizes, add some spaces. eplain provides many of the comodities that we've come to expect from LaTeX, and the bare control over the glue in each slide helps correctly and pleasingly place the elements on the screen.

There's no magic: you just have to understand how boxes and glue work in TeX.

For example:

\input nobeamer.tex

\newslide

\topfill
\centering{
    \big My presentation

    \large (with subtitle)
}

\newslide

\topfill
\centering{ Thank you for coming to my talk. }

\bye

See result

Using

\input nobeamer.tex in your TeX file. Use pdftex to compile the presentation into a pdf. latexmk can be made to use pdftex by creating a file named latexmkrc with the following contents:

$latex = 'pdftex %O %S'

You will have to place a copy of nobeamer.tex in your project directory. MiKTeX is recommended to automatically include the necessary font dependencies, as well as eplain.tex.

nobeamer sets the page size to 8×4 inches, with a horizontal margin of 0.4 inches, and a vertical margin of 0.2 inches.

Commands provided

• Font sizes, from largest to smallest:
  • \big
  • \large
  • \regular
  • \small
  • \smaller
  • \tiny
• \textsize, \scriptsize and \scriptsciptsize,
• \newslide clears the page (\vfill\break),
• \topfill inserts \topglue of 0pt plus 1fill,
• \fold inserts -1fill vertical glue,
• \centering{ ... } centers text,
• \mathcal, \mathrm

Why

Because I read up on TeX and liked its economy in concepts (when compared to LaTeX).

Licence

nobeamer is licenced under a GNU General Public Licence v3 (GPL-3). This informally means that

You may copy, distribute and modify the software as long as you track changes/dates in source files. Any modifications to or software including (via compiler) GPL-licensed code must also be made available under the GPL along with build & install instructions.

See LICENCE.txt for the full text.