Creating Supporting Material

19 Adding Notes for Yourself

A note is text that is intended as a reminder to yourself of what you should say or should keep in mind when presenting a slide. Notes are usually printed out on paper, but with two-screen support they can also be shown on your laptop screen while the main presentation is shown on the projector.

19.1 Specifying Note Contents¶

To add a note to a slide or a frame, use the \note command. This command can be used both inside and outside frames, but it has quite different behaviors then: Inside frames, \note commands accumulate and append a single note page after the current slide; outside frames each \note directly inserts a single note page with the given parameter as contents. Using the \note command inside frames is usually preferably over using them outside, since only commands issued inside frames profit from the option show only slides with notes.

Inside a frame, the effect of \note⟨text⟩ is the following: When you use it somewhere inside the frame on a specific slide, a note page is created after the slide, containing the ⟨text⟩. Since you can add an overlay specification to the \note command, you can specify after which slide the note should be shown. If you use multiple \note commands on one slide, they “accumulate” and are all shown on the same note.

To make the accumulation of notes more convenient, you can use the \note command with the option [item]. The notes added with this option are accumulated in an enumerate list that follows any text inserted using \note.

The following example will produce one note page that follows the second slide and has two entries.

\begin{frame}
 \begin{itemize}
 \item<1-> Eggs
 \item<2-> Plants
   \note[item]<2>{Tell joke about plants.}
   \note[item]<2>{Make it short.}
 \item<3-> Animals
 \end{itemize}
\end{frame}

Outside frames, the command \note creates a single note page. It is “independent” of any usage of the \note commands inside the previous frame. If you say \note inside a frame and \note right after it, two note pages are created.

In the following, the syntax and effects of the \note command inside frames are described:

Next, the syntax and effects of the \note command outside frames are described:

\begin{frame}
some text
\end{frame}
\note{Talk no more than 1 minute.}

\note[enumerate]
{
\item Stress this first.
\item Then this.
}

The following element dictates how the note pages are rendered:

19.2 Specifying Contents for Multiple Notes¶

Sometimes you wish some text to be shown on every note or at least on every note in a long series of notes. To achieve this effect, you can use the following two commands:

\section{My Section}

\AtBeginNote{Finish this section by 14:35.\par}
\begin{frame}
  ...
  \note{some note}
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}
  ...
  \note{some other note}
\end{frame}
\AtBeginNote{}

19.3 Specifying Which Notes and Frames Are Shown¶

Since you normally do not wish the notes to be part of your presentation, you must explicitly say so in the preamble if notes should be included in your presentation. You can use the following beamer options for this:

\documentclass{beamer}
\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
  A frame.
  \note{This is shown on the right.}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

\begin{frame}
  First frame.
\end{frame}
\note{This note is not shown at all (currently).}
\note{This note is shown together with the first frame.}

\begin{frame}
  Second frame.
  \note{This note is shown together with the second frame.}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
  No note text is shown for this frame.
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}<1-3>
 First frame.
 \note<1>{First page of notes for this frame.}
 \note<2>{Second page of notes for this frame.}
 \note<3>{Third page of notes for this frame.}
\end{frame}