Since it takes a lot of time to type presentations out using Beamer, PowerPoint, etc. (I need lots of equations) I have been thinking of shifting to handwritten slides (example).
Does anyone here have experience with handwritten slides that are not "transparencies"? What hardware/software will I need to prepare slides like these?
I see essentially two possibilities:
In case 1, you can scan your notes directly to PDF and present them. If you want to mix "classical" slides with your handwritten slides, you will need to mix PowerPoint or Beamer slides with graphics files containing your handwritten slides. You may need to experiment a bit with what picture format works best here, in terms of both file size and graphics quality.
In case 2, you can create PowerPoint presentations and write directly into the presentation with your Pen, which makes integrating "classical" and handwritten slides quite a bit easier.
Especially if these are for a lecture, you should really be using a blackboard (or whiteboard if you must) and write everything out during class. Presenting slides typically makes you go much faster than you would otherwise -- you forget how much time it took you to figure out the sign in an equation or the limits for some integral. While superficially this might help you "cover" more material, it's sure to lose everyone in the class. By writing things out as you go, you force yourself to think about the equations you're writing and about the speed at which a normal human being is able to process and understand them.
If it doesn't matter so much whether your students can follow the meaning of the equations you're writing down, then don't include them in your presentation. Direct your students to a book (or online notes), and use class time for something that they can follow.
It's a good idea to try, but I also wanted to add some notes of caution. I've used a couple of methods, the tablet and pen method to write on the screen in real-time. I've done this to annotate existing typeset slides during the class.
I've also have handwritten annotations on top of slides which I've scanned and presented as PDFs, and I've also used full handwritten slides scanned as PDF.
Student's can be very sensitive to the unorthodox. If the unorthodox makes for a much better learning experience (or often in their mind - better test scores!) then they will be all for it. However, if it doesn't improve their experience and they believe you are doing it "to save time typing", i.e. for selfish reasons, they can be very negative. The negativity can transfer into losing engagement and depressed results from that class.
If your institution has quality monitoring systems or formalised student feedback mechanisms you need to be sure that a learning quality improvement will result.
[*]OK. I'm the departmental teaching and learning quality officer ... just doing my job!
tl;dr
If you need to present your work with lots of equations, then the problem is not on the tool you are using to do it (PowerPoint, Beamer, etc.), but on the presentation itself.
Take time to think about the presentation first. Specifically, think on:
Unless you are deriving a simple result as E=mc^2 on a slide, on which the derivation itself is beautiful and is thus part of the message, there is only one reason to have a slide full of equations: when you want to convey that your result was non-trivial to derive and that this slide is not supposed to be understood by anyone in the audience.
This is because no audience will follow the technical details of a derivation anyway, except probably for 1 or 2 specialists. If your presentation is good enough, those specialists will read your paper anyway and will be able to follow the derivation on their own pace, along with all the technical details.
Equations are extremely useful because they summarise an extraordinary amount of information, but because of that, they are also difficult to read, understand, and digest. They are like pictures...
My advice is: do not trow equations to the slides just because they are part of a demonstration or something. Put an equation on a slide using the same reasoning you put a graph: only if it is really worth to fully explain it.
Instead, use words to describe how you got there ("using the approximation X, the assumption Y and Z, we can derive [show equation]"). If you believe that someone may ask for more details, just add an extra slide in the end with the full derivation, or just say (the technical details can be found in Ref. ).
Here are some reasons:
All of these distract the audience thus hindering your ability to convey the message.
As Stephen Kolassa mentioned, using a writing tablet or scanning notes are both options. However, if you have an tablet (iPad/Android) or touch screen laptop (mostly Windows 8 like the Surface), there are many software options that allow you to create PDF slides by writing directly on the screen with a stylus. Most people I know (myself included) vastly prefer this option for generating hand written PDFs. I personally have used Notability on an iPad, which I found quite effective. To find more examples of software, start googling for note taking apps. I know several mathematicians who use hand written slides in their research talks (also, check out Rob Ghrist's Funny Little Calculus Text, drawn on a tablet PC). Some will even write on their slides as they present, though I believe this is easier to do with a laptop than a tablet.
If you are serious about open source, this call all be done in Linux as well. One of my collaborators teaches classes with a Wacom Cintiq, which are designed for professional artists, with his Linux machine. This is likely overkill.
It's hard to match both the readability and aesthetic quality of Beamer presentations by hand. Possible, but hard.
Have you considered trying some convenience layer on top of Beamer, like using Pandoc?
It has a Beamer output, and several input formats, like Markdown, Org Mode and Textile.
Another point to consider is the editor you use to write your slides. Using something like Emacs with AUCTeX should dramatically increase productivity compared to plain text editors.
I think several of the responses here have mentioned a key distinction only in passing.
If you are giving a lecture and interacting with students, then being able to write comments "on the fly" is very important. Using a SMART a Podium or other tablet makes this easy to do and also makes it easy to capture the lecture in a recording. In my experience students vastly prefer to have lectures presented in this way rather than with prepared slides, since there is a tendency to move through the slides too quickly.
If you are talking about a conference presentation to fellow researchers, then using prepared slides is definitely the way to go.
