Why should I use LaTeX for presentations?

PDF is not just designed for printing. It is a format for displaying electronic documents, independently of hardware (printer, screen, e-reader, smartphone, projector etc.) and software (such as the operating system). This format is both good for printouts and presentation, so a good choice as output format.

Presentations with technical or scientific content are often based on documents, very often written in LaTeX also because of it's mathematical typesetting capabilities. It's very natural to use the same tool, LaTeX, for the presentation.

The benefits of LaTeX, such as separating the form/style and the content, portability in source, implementation and output, cross-referencing capabilities and typesetting quality, are great for presentations as well.

As I use LaTeX, I can work on the source using Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X, and I can give the presentation away as a PDF for reading or presenting on a conference, the reader or speaker can use Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, a tablet computer, a smartphone - or a printout.

If I would use PowerPoint - well, I would be pretty bound to Windows Version X with PowerPoint Version Y or a suited viewer, which is also a limit for the reader or presenter.

This is simply a longish comment...

I am having some difficulties in trying to understand why you think that way. Let me briefly enumerate your points

1) since LaTeX is a typographic editor not meant to work on the final aspect of the work,

I am pretty sure that made many eyebrows raise after reading that here :) Actually, apart from the fact that LaTeX not being the editor but rather the "language", many typographical rules apply directly to presentations too. You might have seen some presentations with the Powerpoint's default sans-serif font mixed up with Equation Editor's serif-like fonts. They immediately look bizarre and copy-pasted, devaluing its content. For example, this is a simple typographical mistake that you want to avoid. Hence, having its peculiarities, we are still operating in a typography-aware context.

2) and being PDF a format designed for printing.

This is actually confusing since the abbreviation PDF is for Portable Document Format. As you can see, even its name was coined towards the possibility of document exchange. If you print it, you don't need any compatibility or portability etc. anyway. Hence, it is quite the opposite.

Now, extrapolating what you meant from these points, I think you are questioning why we should ever switch to (La)TeX (and probably using beamer package) to produce a presentation that can be produced by Powerpoint or any other WYSIWYG-enabled software.

My take on this is simply due to the fact that they are much more beautiful (personal!) and typographically pleasing (personal!). A big credit goes to the author of the beamer package Till Tantau who also created PGF/TikZ. Many things are already in the right place and merging graphics with slides are naturally supported.

Also, I don't need to carry a 7.1 MB of .ppt file around hoping for compatibility and trying to get the animations working or making sure that the movies have the proper codecs etc. (combine the presentation with VLC Portable and you are, 99% of the cases, good to go). If you are slightly fluent with the respective packages, this method solves a lot of problems by itself and you can simply concentrate on what you are trying to say. Many things that are seemingly missing from these tools are actually bad for presentations anyway. You really don't need clapping noise or badly scaled clip-arts here and there.

I have actually used only once ever, the slide transitions and other attractions when I was addressing some company's big shots. I wanted to impress them (oh boy, so did I) and I used the Impressive script for the bling-bling part. Just try it; I don't like those things in presentations but it is indeed impressive :). But, surprise surprise, I had to spent 5-10 minutes of precious meeting time on explaining how I did it. So in that perspective, served its purpose? Nope!

Rule of thumb is: Don't try to impress the audience with gadgets etc. if you need their attention drawn to the content.

You might say "Well OK, how about creating slides? It's a pain in the rear bumper to put a single logo over that corner of the page and details like that makes it super difficult, whereas in Powerpoint you just click and it's there."

I think that is a valid point against LaTeX based presentation preparation in general. However, after a few attempts you simply get many things working and most of the stuff is not required anyway other than some logos and a few words here and there.

Obviously, you need to try it out and see it for yourself to decide.

There are plenty of good reasons to use LaTeX for presentations.

For me, a key reason that I havn't seen here so far is this:

• Consistent tools. I use LaTeX for my regular work. I need an easy way to get my "printed" work into the presentation. LaTeX-beamer allows me to do this very easily. All the way to publishing it on my homepage.
  This in particular includes the various functionality ranging from formulas, code excerpts to any other LaTeX extension.

• Focus. On the contents, not on the presentation. Once you are used to LaTeX presentations, Powerpoint pretty much looks like a drawing program to you, instead of a presentation tool.

• Quality. Even with "just" screen resolution, LaTeX just looks more polished.

As for PDF. It is designed to give a guaranteed result. I know plenty of people that always keep a PDF version of their presentation around, just in case that PowerPoint again screws up. Heck, I've seen Microsoft engineers do their PowerPoint presentation in edit mode, because switching to presentation mode would screw up the text positions. Plus, the PDF can easily be put online. And even more: pdflatex with the hyperref package will not just create a dumb PDF, but actually a cross-referenced PDF.

As for being static. I never use animations in my presentations. They tend to distract people from what I'm saying. And after all, it's not a slideshow, but a talk.

Some additional benefits:

• Consistent screen and print versions. With little effort you can use the same source to produce both screen versions (with overlays) and print/handout versions (no/reduced overlays). The print quality will be up to your usual standards.
• BibTeX for easy citations in presentations. Even with a link to the publication.
• Includes. You can easily build multiple versions with overlap, if you structure your input data appropriately. For example, you can have multiple chapters, and build either a single big presentation (for reference), or per-lecture excerpts easily. This can be useful on many levels, e.g. including "about us" slides easily, sharing chapters or topics across presentations etc. All without copy&paste - fix an error in one place, have it fixed in the other place, too. Include some additional material as backup slides for your presentation version etc.
• Programmable. You can even write programs to generate your slides. Or plots (this is where I mostly use it).