lucid

A modern Beamer theme you can use without installing dozens of CTAN packages.

I really, really hate all PowerPoint-like programs but also dislike most Beamer templates, so back in my third year of university I invested one night in making my own. I didn't understand anything about CTAN packages, .sty files and tikz (and to a large extent I still don't), but Beamer-Theme-Execushares provided an excellent starting point and the resulting theme served me well throughout the last 5 years - I only recently switched to my current institution's (Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg) colors and logo and fixed a few things that kept annoying me. There are still a few issues I'd like to address, but because I find writing style files to be a nightmare PRs are more than ever welcome.

Usage

You can of course use lucid to write your presentations in LaTeX and compile them with pdflatex. A fairly standard texlive installation should provide everything you need, as the only package required is tikz.

If you hate writing presentations in LaTeX

However, I warmly recommend that you write your presentations in Markdown and generate beamer slides with pandoc. This is a much easier way to obtain perfectly fine slides in 99% of the cases, and allows for LaTeX injections that fix the remaining 1% of things that you can't express in Markdown. For instance, you can add a \pause wherever you want.

I usually just write regular Markdown using # for each new section and ## for each new slide, add a metadata section in the beginning of the file, for instance

---
title: "The title"
subtitle: "a possibly very long subtitle" # OPTIONAL
author: "My Name" # OPTIONAL
theme: "mhthm"
logo: "gu.png" # OPTIONAL - if present, it should as of now be the path to a 300x300 image
date: "the date" # OPTIONAL - will appear on the title page on the bottom right
institute: "Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg" # OPTIONAL
---

and then run

pandoc slides.md -t beamer --slide-level 2 -o slides.pdf

to generate the PDF.

See slides.pdf for some example pandoc-generated slides and slides.md to take a look at the very simple source code.

For further information about the pandoc + beamer combo, I think alexeygumirov is the most exhaustive source. A more compact tutorial is available here.

Namesake

In Italian, lucidi is the word that indicates slides meant for old-fashioned overhead projectors. Not to mention that having a quick and simple way to generate acceptable-looking slides greatly helps me mantenere la luciditá (stay sane).