The beamer class is focused on producing (on-screen) presentations, along with support material such as handouts and speaker notes. Content is created in a frame environment, each of which can be divided up into a number of slides (actual output pages). A simple 'action' notation is used to specify which material appears on each slide within a frame. The class supports a range of environments to enable complex slide relationships to be constructed.

The appearance of slides is controlled by a template system. Many of the elements of slides can be adjusted by setting simple key-based values in the preamble. More complex changes can be implemented by altering specific, targeted definitions without needing to rewrite entire blocks of code. This allows a variety of visual appearances to be selected for the same content source.

The beamer class is made available under the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) and the GNU Public License (GPL). See the information in LICENSE for information on licensing.