Your First LaTeX Presentation–Title Page

Demonstration of how to create a basic presentation and title page using the LaTeX class document: Beamer.

1. Create a simple title page

The following code creates a simple title page in LaTeX using Beamer. It includes a title, author name and a talk date:

% Creating a simple Title Page in Beamer
\documentclass{beamer}

% Theme choice:
\usetheme{AnnArbor}

% Title page details: 
\title{Your First \LaTeX{} Presentation}
\author{latex-beamer.com}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}

% Title page frame
\begin{frame}
    \titlepage
\end{frame}

\end{document}

Compiling this code yields:

Comments:

• We have chosen a predefined theme in Beamer, known as AnnArbor which is loaded using the command: \usetheme{AnnArbor}
• \title{}: is used to set a title to the presentation
• \author{}: is used to add authors’ names to the talk
• \date{}: is used to print the date of the talk, using \today will print the compilation day of the presentation.

2. Add a subtitle to the beamer title page

This can be achieved by adding \subtitle{My-subtitle} to the document preamble. Updating the above code and compiling it, we get the following output:

3. Title page with multiple authors

In the previous example, we used \author{} to add the presenter name to the title page. Using the same command, we can add more authors. Check the following code:

% Multiple authors
\author{First~Author \and 
  Second~Author \and
  Third~Author \and
  Fourth~Author \and
  Fifth~Author}

Using this line code in the above code, we get the following result:

We have three points to highlight about the above line code:

• Point 1: We used \and command between authors names.
• Point 2: We added ~ to keep the first name and last name of each author together, otherwise a new line is automatically created to get a sufficient space.
• Point 3: Authors’ names, presentation title and the date are printed at the bottom of the presentation (footer). These can be modified easily which is the purpose of the “Modify footer details” section.

4. Add author’s affiliation

Here is an example with the affiliation “Online Beamer Tutorials“:

% Add author affiliation
\documentclass{beamer}

% Theme choice:
\usetheme{AnnArbor}

% Title page details: 
\title{Your First \LaTeX{} Presentation}
\author{latex-beamer.com}
\institute{Online Beamer Tutorials}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}

% Title page frame
\begin{frame}
    \titlepage
\end{frame}

\end{document}

Compiling this code yields the following result:

5. Add several authors with different affiliations

If there are several affiliations or more than one author with different affiliations, we add the command \inst{} inside \author{} and \institute{} commands. Here is an illustrative example of two authors with different affiliations:

% Two authors with different affiliations
\author{First Author\inst{1} \and Second Author\inst{2}}

\institute{\inst{1} Affiliation of the 1st author \and
 \inst{2} Affiliation of the 2nd author}

Here is the obtained result:

6. Modify footer details

As we mentioned above, authors names and affiliations, presentation title and date are printed at the bottom of the presentation.

If text is too long and doesn’t fit well with the footer length or If you would like to put something else, we can add brackets to the command in question with desired text. So we use:

• \title[This one is printed in the footer]{This is original title of the talk}
• \author[short text printed in the footer]{authors names of the talk}
• \institute[another short text]{authors affiliation}: The text “another short text” will be added between pair of round brackets to the footer (author section).
• \date[Anything else]{2021}: The text “Anything else” will be added at the bottom right corner of presentation.

Here is an example:

% Modify footer text: 
\title[Center text]{Your First \LaTeX{} Presentation}
\subtitle{My-subtitle}
\author[Left text]{latex-beamer.com}
\date[Right text]{\today}

Output:

If you would like to remove details from the footer, we can use empty brackets, eg. \author[]{Authors name}, \date[]{2021}, etc.

Summary

• The commands \title{}, \subtitle{}, \author{}, \institute{} and \date{} allow us to add a title, subtitle, authors names and their affiliations, and the date of the talk, respectively. We should put these commands in the preamble of the document.
• To create a title page, we need to put \titlepage command inside a frame environment.
• Using \title[short title]{Presentation title} will print short title at the bottom of the presentation, depending on the used theme.
• The line code \title[]{Presentation title} will remove the talk title from the footer. This applies also to \date{}, \author{} and \institute{} commands.

Next Lesson: 02 Add and Position a Logo in Beamer