Which package to use for presentations? Beamer, Prosper, or Other

I highly recommend the beamer class.

Here are features of presentation classes intended to help you deciding:

  • beamer provides a huge amount of features, a lot of themes and sophisticated ways for customization. It offers an outstanding comprehensive documentation. It can be used with LaTeX and also with pdfLaTeX. So it's capable of using pdfLaTeX microtypographic features, furthermore it supports PNG, JPEG and PDF image formats besides EPS. It uses pgf for graphics.

  • powerdot cannot be used with pdfLaTeX. It uses PSTricks for graphics and supports EPS images. So, it may be a good choice for a PSTricks user who doesn't need direct JPEG, PNG or PDF image support. It also provides templates, further it offers a LyX style file.

  • prosper is older. It's successor is HA-Prosper. powerdot has been built on it, so I would not use prosper any more.

There are further and even older classes, such as seminar and slides, the latter is a standard LaTeX2e class.

See also the answers to:

  • Are there alternatives to Beamer for slides?

  • Presentations best style


I do not have a basis of comparison as I've used nothing else (except for SliTeX back in the day), but I have to say that beamer is phenomenal.

Its templating, font, and color selection mechanism make it infinitely customizable, and the overlay mechanisms allows slideshows to be really dynamic. I've never regretted learning it.


My approach is not really LaTeX-specific (it's not a package), but I'm posting it for the record. It's also very minimalistic.

For small presentations, or urgent ones, you can go with pandoc export to Slidy, for example (pandoc also exports to S5 and DZSlides). you can write a simple document with the article class and run pandoc in it.

Here's a MWE

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\author{A. Author}
\title{Lorem ipsum}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{Lorem}
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec convallis, neque a scelerisque ultricies, urna metus ultricies ligula, eu sagittis dolor est non dolor. Nunc vestibulum hendrerit urna, convallis egestas diam interdum sit amet.
\section{Lists}
You can make lists:
\begin{itemize}
\item Lorem
\item Ipsum
\item sit dolor
\item amet
\end{itemize}
\section{Numbered Lists}
\begin{enumerate}
\item Lorem
\item Ipsum
\item sit dolor
\item amet
\end{enumerate}
\end{document}

And then run 

pandoc --self-contained --to=slidy <latex file>.tex --output=<slidy file>.html

And you get a very, very simple presentation in a few minutes. The bad side is you'll have to rely on your presentation contents and your oratory skills: it's not “so convincing that your audience will believe everything” (I'm sorry, but that just sounds too comic to me)

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