Best font size for Latex Beamer [closed]

Question

I am preparing a presentation in latex using the beamer package. I am wondering what font size "pros" who give a lot of presentations use to make sure people in the back of the room can see. The default font size seems a bit small to me.

Answer 1

With beamer, I always use

\documentclass[14pt]{beamer}

The actual font size is larger than 14pt because of the scaling that beamer uses.

Answer 2

The font should be generously large, so that everyone can see it: for typical talk situations font size is not the main constraint, but amount of information being displayed per size.

The advice I generally heard has been to have very few slides with more than 10 to 12 lines of content on them, including the slides heading. The beamer manual suggests that its default of an 11pt font (onto a quite small page, so this is not as small as it sounds) leads to a maximum of around 20 lines on the page, which seems to be rather too high.

By contrast Powerpoint uses a default font size of 17pt, which gives much better amount of information, but often seems to lead, to my taste, to somewhat bombastic presentations.

The middle of this range, around 14pt, seems a good median.

Some further considerations:

1. I am not a beamer expert. I usually handwrite my slides!
2. You can justify using rather bigger fonts, to give a point some punch, and sometimes you have a complex idea that is best presented all at once. Variations in the amount of information of the slide should be accompanied by variations in how you present that slide: this is easy with less information, but the risk with more information is that you don't guide the audience through all of what you are presenting properly.
3. You generally should read out everything on the slide. If this seems silly for some piece of content, it probably shouldn't be there. Don't be tempted to fit large pieces of code on a slide and expect the audience to just absorb what is there: chop out the bits that matter and explain them properly.