Creating Overlays in Beamer

One of Beamer’s most powerful tools, it lets us overlay almost any element of a frame in many possible ways.

In this lesson, we are going to see how to accomplish that, and we are going to understand the overlay specifications.

1. Frames vs Slides

In Beamer, a presentation consists of a series of frames. In turn, each frame can consist of a series of slides. In previous tutorials, you may have not seen a frame with multiple slides yet. In the output, every slide of the frame is a page of the PDF document; since until now every frame had only one slide, pages, frames and slides were all the same. From now on, we shall distinguish between frames and slides.

2. The \pause command

Let’s get our hands on Beamer and create the simplest frame with multiple slides. The \pause offers the easiest way to do this, although it may not be the most flexible.

The following code is an example about using \pause command inside itemize environment:

% Overlays in beamer (pause command)
\documentclass{beamer}

% Theme choice:
\usetheme{Frankfurt}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}{Creating Overlays in Beamer}{Pause command}

\begin{itemize}
    \item Shown from the first slide on.
\pause
    \item Shown from the second slide on.
\pause
    \item Shown from the third slide on.
\end{itemize}

\end{frame}

\end{document}

Compiling this code creates three slides as follows:

• 

• 

• 

Although \pause may seem very useful, we are going to see some other commands that fine tune the overlay behavior. But first, let’s understand the core concept of overlay specifications.

3. Overlay specifications for text formatting commands

For most commands, the overlay specification causes the command to simply be ignored on slides that are outside the specification. The text formatting commands are:

\textbf, \textit, \textmd, \textnormal, \textrm, \textsc, \textsf, \textsl, \texttt, \textup, \emph, \color, \textcolor, \alert, \structure

Check the following example:

% Overlay specifications
\documentclass{beamer}

% Theme choice:
\usetheme{Frankfurt}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}{Overlay specifications}

\textit<1>{
    This will be italized text only on the first slide.}
\textbf<2-4>{
    This will be bold text from the second slide to the fourth.}
\texttt<5->{
    This will be typewriter text from the fifth slide on.}

\end{frame}
\end{document}

Compiling this code creates 5 slides as shown below:

Outside the specified slides, the given sentences are in usual roman font.

It would affect slides 2,3,4,6,8,11 and the ones that come after the 11th.

Continue or check the Next Lesson: 11 Insert a GIF into LaTeX Beamer — Short guide