Pecha Kucha presentation using Beamer

Question

I have to make a Pecha-Kucha ( http://www.pecha-kucha.org/ ) presentation for a class. I know that there is a way to get PowerPoint to automatically switch slides every 20 seconds, but I prefer using Beamer with LaTeX which outputs a PDF. Does anyone know a way to get a PDF to automatically switch slides every 20 seconds?

Answer 1

You can use Adobe Reader for that. Edit Preferences -> Full Screen -> Advance every [x] seconds.

Answer 2

Impressive! is a pdf presentation tool that is pretty nifty. For all I know it was designed for Beamer (the sample presentation images on the home page are Beamer...). You can run it with the -a option and a time amount (20 seconds) and it will auto advance for you.

Aside from that, if you do Beamer presentations often, it's not a bad tool to have in the tool-belt; it allows for turning the mouse into a "spotlight", zooming, fading to white or black to digress for a bit without the distraction of the slides, a timer option so you can see how much time you have left (on your screen, not for the audience), and probably even more. Again, pretty cool when you're using PDFs to present.

Here is the full list of commands: LINK.

Answer 3

Section 14.1.2 of the beameruserguide might be helpful. As I understand it, this will mostly only work in Adobe Reader.

Answer 4

I create a beamer presentation for my class (Im a statistician teacher), and the code is:

\documentclass[12pt,xcolor=x11names]{beamer}
\usecolortheme[named=darkgray]{structure}
\usetheme{Warsaw}
\usepackage{fourier}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{tikz}

\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
\hypersetup{%
        pdfpagemode=FullScreen,%
        pdfstartpage=1,%
        colorlinks=false,%
        linkcolor=magenta,%
        pdftitle={Lorem Ipsum},%
        pdfauthor={Dolor, Et},%
        pdfsubject={Lorem},%
        pdfkeywords={lorem, ipsum, dolor}%
        }
\title{Dolor Ipsum}
\subtitle{Lorem Ipsum et}
\author{Dolor Et}
\date{}

\begin{document}
{
\setbeamercolor{background canvas}{bg=darkgray}
\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{5}
%\titlepage
\centerline{\textcolor{white}{\textbf{\large{Dolor Ipsum}}}}
\vspace{.3cm}
\centerline{\textcolor{white}{\textbf{\large{Lorem Ipsum}}}}
\vspace{1cm}
\centerline{\textcolor{black}{\textbf{Dolor Et}}}
%\centerline{\small\color[rgb]{0.01,0.33,0.58}
%\textbf{http://www.lorem.org}}
\end{frame}
}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image1.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image2.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image3.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image4.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image5.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image6.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image7.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image8.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image9.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image10.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image11.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image12.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image13.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image14.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image15.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image16.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image17.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image18.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image19.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\transduration{20}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{image20.jpg} 
    };
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

\begin{document}

Answer 5

There are some video examples of people doing Pecha kucha talks at http://www.businessofsoftware.org/lightningtalk.aspx

Having tried one, I put some things I learnt from the experience on a blog article at http://www.jpedal.org/PDFblog/2009/11/pecha-kucha-at-bos-2009/

Answer 6

I do not think that such action is available for a PDF document, since it's just an XML document with embedded scripts. Here's some descriptions of what you can do with it: http://www.pdfscripting.com/public/47.cfm

You'll probably have to rely on a pdf viewer for that.