# How to make a presentation that includes math symbols?

For many years, I've used Latex to create my presentations, because I need to include mathematical formulae and symbols. However, it's sometimes quite cumbersome to use, and it's much harder to do "visual" effects (I'm not talking about animations, but for instance about arrows emphasizing a particular word, or connecting two words together, etc) compared to, say powerpoint.

I'm now trying to keep the maths to a minimum in my presentation (that was actually a really good advice given by a good speaker I talked to), but I still need them a bit, so my question is: what good (combined?) solution exist to create nice presentation that involve mathematical symbols?

It involves some Latex programming, but you can do all of these things with Beamer and Tikz; see for instance http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/beamer-arrows/ and https://sites.google.com/site/kaarebmikkelsen/in-the-news/fancyequationsinlatexbeamerwithtikz.

Sample image from the first link:

Essentially, Tikz allows you to remember the positions of the elements in each picture (using \tikzstyle{every picture}+=[remember picture]), and then add popups, markers and arrows between them as an overlay over the already typeset page (using \begin{tikzpicture}[overlay]).

The main benefit with respect to other solutions is the quality and consistency of Latex typesetting, which we all know and love. The main drawback is the (possibly) cumbersome Latex programming, which we all know and loathe.

Also, it's all plain text (with simplifies automation, version control...)