Dynamic slides

The PDF format does not (trivially) allow to include animations, as one would be used to from, say, Powerpoint. The solution PDF-based presentation slides use is to create multiple PDF pages for one slide, each with slightly different content. This enables us to have some basic dynamic elements on our slides.

In this book, we will use the term logical slide for a section of content that was created by one call to #polylux-slide, and subslide for a resulting PDF page. Each logical side can have an arbitrary amount of subslides and every subslide is part of exactly one logical slide. Note that the same page number is displayed for all subslides of a logical slide.

As you will see soon, the commands for creating dynamic content all have some way of specifying on what subslides some content is supposed to be shown. One of those subslides has the highest index, of course. Of all those commands with their respective highest subslide to show something, the maximum is take again and that defines the number of PDF pages produced for one logical slide. For example, suppose we have a slide with the following commands:

• show something on subslides 1 and 3
• show someting from subslide 2 to subslide 4
• show someting until subslide 6

This results in 6 PDF pages for this logical slide.

In the LaTeX beamer package, the functionalities described in this part are called "overlays".

Everything discussed here works just as well when you use themes. For simplicity, we will work through the material without them, though.