What is Pause in Beamer?

You may have seen people making a presentation in beamer and showing slides progressively, pressing enter each time they want to show a new element. This is the most used feature of slide presentation programs, and of course beamer offers you a way to emulate it using beamer overlays.

Pause, one of beamer overlay commands to show elements one by one!

The \pause command offers the easiest way to show a frame step by step. If you put \pause at a given point in the frame, the first slide contains all the elements until this first appearance. Then the following slide will contain all the elements until the second appearance of \pause, and so on until the last appearance, where the remaining elements of the frame are shown in the last slide.

The following illustrative example shows how to uncover elements of a list one by one using the pause command:

% Beamer pause command
\documentclass{beamer}

\usetheme{EastLansing}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}{What is Pause in Beamer?}

The \textbf{trajectory} of a switched system in steady state reflects:

\begin{itemize}
    \item The switching frequency;
\pause
    \item The spent time in each subsystem;
\pause
    \item The number of subsystems used;
\pause 
    \item and the succession of these subsystems.
\end{itemize}

\end{frame}

\end{document}

Compiling this code yields to 4 slides showing the list elements one by one:

Beamer has much more to offer in this aspect, especially using overlay specifications, that offer you an incredible amount of possibilities. If you are interested on a more thorough tutorial on beamer overlays, you can find it here.