Slider

Slide overlay software based on beamer and inkscape. This project is currently used in DTU coursebox.

What it does

Slider allows you to combine free-hand drawing with a standard LaTeX beamer slideshow. It allows you to insert a special \osvg{label} tag in your beamer slides:

\begin{frame}\osvg{label}
Various standard latex stuff
\end{frame}

Then by running the slider command (see below) this will automatically create a transparent .svg file placed "above" the LaTeX contents which allows you to do free-hand drawing. While you could do this manually, slider has the advantage it maintains the LaTeX contents as a non-editable background layer in the .svg file so you can do absolute positioning etc. Naturally, you can insert new \osvg tags (and keep them updated) at any point by just running the slider command.

Install:

Simple pip-install the package and you should be all set.

pip install beamer-slider

You can import the package using import slider.

Use and examples

Go to an empty directory where you want to start a slideshow and run the command:

python -m slider index.tex

This will start a small beamer project and populate it with the (few) necesary files to make the framework work. You can see the generated files in the /examples/new_project folder. The main LaTeX file looks like this:

 
\documentclass[aspectratio=43]{beamer}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\newtoggle{overlabel_includesvgs}
\newtoggle{overlabel_includelabels}
\toggletrue{overlabel_includesvgs}
\toggletrue{overlabel_includelabels}
\input{beamer_slider_preamble.tex}

\title{Example slide show}
\author{Tue Herlau}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\maketitle
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}\osvg{myoverlay} % Use the \osvg{labelname} - tag to create new overlays. Run slider and check the ./osvgs directory for the svg files!
\title{Slide with an overlay}
This is some example text!
\end{frame}

\end{document}

And the generated PDF file looks like this:

to start a beamer project. Edit index.tex (see how you add overlays in the file) and after you edit the overlay .svg files, run

slider.py index.tex

to update the overlays. Note the overlay .svg files by default contains all the text in the slide they are imported from. This is helpful if you want to move elements around. You can always add new overlays by using the '\osvg{my_label}' command in LaTeX.