beamer presentation styles

Changing the Way Things Look

15.1 five flavors of themes ¶.

Themes make it easy to change the appearance of a presentation. The beamer class uses five different kinds of themes:

Conceptually, a presentation theme dictates for every single detail of a presentation what it looks like. Thus, choosing a particular presentation theme will setup for, say, the numbers in enumeration what color they have, what color their background has, what font is used to render them, whether a circle or ball or rectangle or whatever is drawn behind them, and so forth. Thus, when you choose a presentation theme, your presentation will look the way someone (the creator of the theme) thought that a presentation should look like. Presentation themes typically only choose a particular color theme, font theme, inner theme, and outer theme that go well together.

A color theme only dictates which colors are used in a presentation. If you have chosen a particular presentation theme and then choose a color theme, only the colors of your presentation will change. A color theme can specify colors in a very detailed way: For example, a color theme can specifically change the colors used to render, say, the border of a button, the background of a button, and the text on a button.

A font theme dictates which fonts or font attributes are used in a presentation. As for colors, the font of all text elements used in a presentation can be specified independently.

An inner theme specifies how certain elements of a presentation are typeset. This includes all elements that are at the “inside” of the frame, that is, that are not part of the headline, footline, or sidebars. This includes all enumerations, itemize environments, block environments, theorem environments, or the table of contents. For example, an inner theme might specify that in an enumeration the number should be typeset without a dot and that a small circle should be shown behind it. The inner theme would not specify what color should be used for the number or the circle (this is the job of the color theme) nor which font should be used (this is the job of the font theme).

An outer theme specifies what the “outside” or “border” of the presentation slides should look like. It specifies whether there are head- and footlines, what is shown in them, whether there is a sidebar, where the logo goes, where the navigation symbols and bars go, and so on. It also specifies where the frametitle is put and how it is typeset.

The different themes reside in the five subdirectories theme , color , font , inner , and outer of the directory beamer/themes . Internally, a theme is stored as a normal style file. However, to use a theme, the following special commands should be used:

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { ⟨ name list ⟩ }

Installs the presentation theme named ⟨ name ⟩ . Currently, the effect of this command is the same as saying \usepackage for the style file named beamertheme ⟨ name ⟩ .sty for each ⟨ name ⟩ in the ⟨ name list ⟩ .

\usecolortheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { ⟨ name list ⟩ }

Same as \usetheme , only for color themes. Color style files are named beamercolortheme ⟨ name ⟩ .sty .

\usefonttheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { ⟨ name ⟩ }

Same as \usetheme , only for font themes. Font style files are named beamerfonttheme ⟨ name ⟩ .sty .

\useinnertheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { ⟨ name ⟩ }

Same as \usetheme , only for inner themes. Inner style files are named beamerinnertheme ⟨ name ⟩ .sty .

\useoutertheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { ⟨ name ⟩ }

Same as \usetheme , only for outer themes. Outer style files are named beameroutertheme ⟨ name ⟩ .sty .

If you do not use any of these commands, a sober default theme is used for all of them. In the following, the presentation themes that come with the beamer class are described. The element, layout, color, and font themes are presented in the following sections.

15.2 Presentation Themes without Navigation Bars ¶

A presentation theme dictates for every single detail of a presentation what it looks like. Normally, having chosen a particular presentation theme, you do not need to specify anything else having to do with the appearance of your presentation—the creator of the theme should have taken care of that for you. However, you still can change things afterward either by using a different color, font, element, or even layout theme; or by changing specific colors, fonts, or templates directly.

When Till started naming the presentation themes, he soon ran out of ideas on how to call them. Instead of giving them more and more cumbersome names, he decided to switch to a different naming convention: Except for two special cases, all presentation themes are named after cities. These cities happen to be cities in which or near which there was a conference or workshop that he attended or that a co-author of his attended.

All themes listed without author mentioned were developed by Till. If a theme has not been developed by us (that is, if someone else is to blame), this is indicated with the theme. We have sometimes slightly changed or “corrected” submitted themes, but we still list the original authors.

\usetheme{ default }

As the name suggests, this theme is installed by default. It is a sober no-nonsense theme that makes minimal use of color or font variations. This theme is useful for all kinds of talks, except for very long talks.

\usetheme [headheight= ⟨ head height ⟩ ,footheight= ⟨ foot height ⟩ ] { boxes }

For this theme, you can specify an arbitrary number of templates for the boxes in the headline and in the footline. You can add a template for another box by using the following commands.

\addheadbox { ⟨ beamer color ⟩ }{ ⟨ box template ⟩ }

Each time this command is invoked, a new box is added to the head line, with the first added box being shown on the left. All boxes will have the same size.

The ⟨ beamer color ⟩ will be used to setup the foreground and background colors of the box.

A similar effect as the above commands can be achieved by directly installing a head template that contains two beamercolorbox es:

While being more complicated, the above commands offer more flexibility.

\addfootbox { ⟨ beamer color ⟩ }{ ⟨ box template ⟩ }

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { Bergen }

A theme based on the inmargin inner theme and the rectangles inner theme. Using this theme is not quite trivial since getting the spacing right can be trickier than with most other themes. Also, this theme goes badly with columns. You may wish to consult the remarks on the inmargin inner theme.

Bergen is a town in Norway. It hosted iwpec 2004.

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { Boadilla }

A theme giving much information in little space. The following ⟨ options ⟩ may be given:

• secheader causes a headline to be inserted showing the current section and subsection. By default, this headline is not shown.

Theme author: Manuel Carro. Boadilla is a village in the vicinity of Madrid, hosting the University’s Computer Science department.

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { Madrid }

Like the Boadilla theme, except that stronger colors are used and that the itemize icons are not modified. The same ⟨ options ⟩ as for the Boadilla theme may be given.

Theme author: Manuel Carro. Madrid is the capital of Spain.

\usetheme{ AnnArbor }

Like Boadilla , but using the colors of the University of Michigan.

Theme author: Madhusudan Singh. The University of Michigan is located at Ann Arbor.

\usetheme{ CambridgeUS }

Like Boadilla , but using the colors of MIT.

Theme author: Madhusudan Singh.

\usetheme{ EastLansing }

Like Boadilla , but using the colors of Michigan State University.

Theme author: Alan Munn. Michigan State University is located in East Lansing.

\usetheme{ Pittsburgh }

A sober theme. The right-flushed frame titles creates an interesting “tension” inside each frame.

Pittsburgh is a town in the eastern USA. It hosted the second recomb workshop of snp s and haplotypes, 2004.

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { Rochester }

A dominant theme without any navigational elements. It can be made less dominant by using a different color theme.

The following ⟨ options ⟩ may be given:

• height= ⟨ dimension ⟩ sets the height of the frame title bar.

Rochester is a town in upstate New York, USA. Till visited Rochester in 2001.

15.3 Presentation Themes with a Tree-Like Navigation Bar ¶

\usetheme{ Antibes }

A dominant theme with a tree-like navigation at the top. The rectangular elements mirror the rectangular navigation at the top. The theme can be made less dominant by using a different color theme.

Antibes is a town in the south of France. It hosted stacs 2002.

\usetheme{ JuanLesPins }

A variation on the Antibes theme that has a much “smoother” appearance. It can be made less dominant by choosing a different color theme.

Juan–Les–Pins is a cozy village near Antibes. It hosted stacs 2002.

\usetheme{ Montpellier }

A sober theme giving basic navigational hints. The headline can be made more dominant by using a different color theme.

Montpellier is in the south of France. It hosted stacs 2004.

15.4 Presentation Themes with a Table of Contents Sidebar ¶

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { Berkeley }

A dominant theme. If the navigation bar is on the left, it dominates since it is seen first. The height of the frame title is fixed to two and a half lines, thus you should be careful with overly long titles. A logo will be put in the corner area. Rectangular areas dominate the layout. The theme can be made less dominant by using a different color theme.

By default, the current entry of the table of contents in the sidebar will be highlighted by using a more vibrant color. A good alternative is to highlight the current entry by using a different color for the background of the current point. The color theme sidebartab installs the appropriate colors, so you just have to say

This color theme works with all themes that show a table of contents in the sidebar.

This theme is useful for long talks like lectures that require a table of contents to be visible all the time.

• hideallsubsections causes only sections to be shown in the sidebar. This is useful, if you need to save space.

• hideothersubsections causes only the subsections of the current section to be shown. This is useful, if you need to save space.

• left puts the sidebar on the left (default).

• right puts the sidebar on the right.

• width= ⟨ dimension ⟩ sets the width of the sidebar. If set to zero, no sidebar is created.

Berkeley is on the western coast of the USA, near San Francisco. Till visited Berkeley for a year in 2004.

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { PaloAlto }

A variation on the Berkeley theme with less dominance of rectangular areas. The same ⟨ options ⟩ as for the Berkeley theme can be given.

Palo Alto is also near San Francisco. It hosted the Bay Area Theory Workshop 2004.

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { Goettingen }

A relatively sober theme useful for a longer talk that demands a sidebar with a full table of contents. The same ⟨ options ⟩ as for the Berkeley theme can be given.

Göttingen is a town in Germany. It hosted the 42nd Theorietag.

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { Marburg }

A very dominant variation of the Goettingen theme. The same ⟨ options ⟩ may be given.

Marburg is a town in Germany. It hosted the 46th Theorietag.

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { Hannover }

In this theme, the sidebar on the left is balanced by right-flushed frame titles.

• width= ⟨ dimension ⟩ sets the width of the sidebar.

Hannover is a town in Germany. It hosted the 48th Theorietag.

15.5 Presentation Themes with a Mini Frame Navigation ¶

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { Berlin }

A dominant theme with strong colors and dominating rectangular areas. The head- and footlines give lots of information and leave little space for the actual slide contents. This theme is useful for conferences where the audience is not likely to know the title of the talk or who is presenting it. The theme can be made less dominant by using a different color theme.

• compress causes the mini frames in the headline to use only a single line. This is useful for saving space.

Berlin is the capital of Germany.

\usetheme [ ⟨ options ⟩ ] { Ilmenau }

A variation on the Berlin theme. The same ⟨ options ⟩ may be given.

Ilmenau is a town in Germany. It hosted the 40th Theorietag.

\usetheme{ Dresden }

A variation on the Berlin theme with a strong separation into navigational stuff at the top/bottom and a sober main text. The same ⟨ options ⟩ may be given.

Dresden is a town in Germany. It hosted STACS 2001.

\usetheme{ Darmstadt }

A theme with a strong separation into a navigational upper part and an informational main part. By using a different color theme, this separation can be lessened.

Darmstadt is a town in Germany.

\usetheme{ Frankfurt }

A variation on the Darmstadt theme that is slightly less cluttered by leaving out the subsection information.

Frankfurt is a town in Germany.

\usetheme{ Singapore }

A not-too-sober theme with navigation that does not dominate.

Singapore is located in south-eastern Asia. It hosted cocoon 2002.

\usetheme{ Szeged }

A sober theme with a strong dominance of horizontal lines.

Szeged is on the south border of Hungary. It hosted dlt 2003.

15.6 Presentation Themes with Section and Subsection Tables ¶

\usetheme{ Copenhagen }

A not-quite-too-dominant theme. This theme gives compressed information about the current section and subsection at the top and about the title and the author at the bottom. No shadows are used, giving the presentation a “flat” look. The theme can be made less dominant by using a different color theme.

Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark. It is connected to Malmö by the Øresund bridge.

\usetheme{ Luebeck }

A variation on the Copenhagen theme.

Lübeck is a town in northern Germany. It hosted the 41st Theorietag.

\usetheme{ Malmoe }

A more sober variation of the Copenhagen theme.

Malmö is a town in southern Sweden. It hosted fct 2001.

\usetheme{ Warsaw }

A dominant variation of the Copenhagen theme.

Warsaw is the capital of Poland. It hosted mfcs 2002.

15.7 Presentation Themes Included For Compatibility ¶

Earlier versions of beamer included some further themes. These themes are still available for compatibility, though they are now implemented differently (they also mainly install appropriate color, font, inner, and outer themes). However, they may or may not honor color themes and they will not be supported in the future. The following list shows which of the new themes should be used instead of the old themes. (When switching, you may want to use the font theme structurebold with the option onlysmall .)

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Better Beamer Presentations the Easy Way

October 01, 2019 9 minute read

Everyone knows that Beamer makes frankly terrible presentations without a good deal of help. A well crafted Beamer presentation can be a thing of beauty, especially since you can use knitr or R Markdown to automatically generate tables and figures, but it takes a lot of work. We all have our own little tricks to do things like get more space between items in a list (ending every \item line with \\~\\ ) and the simple but repetitive tasks we have to do every single slide (opening a \Large environment to make text more readable).

Three little tricks

I finally got tired of all this and decided to waste a lot of time now to save even more time later. To do that, I headed to Stack Exchange and started digging into the Beamer documentation.

Give me some space

We’ll start with the base Beamer class. There are a number of Beamer themes that are much better than the default theme, but I’m going to focus on things we can do to improve even the default theme. Here’s our humble starting point.

The first thing anyone who’s ever taken a graphic design class will tell you is that we need to space out those lines. With them all crammed in the middle, they’re harder to read and there’s ton of empty space up top and down below. We can insert a \vfill at the top and bottom of the slide, and between each line, but this gets old quickly. After plenty of googling and a few less than perfect solutions, I came across this Stack Exchange answer . By adding the following code to your preamble, any items in a \itemize environment will be evenly spaced vertically.

Looking better already!

Super size it

Next we need to enlarge our text to make it easier to read. Again, we can do this manually on every slide, but that’s a giant pain. I found this old thread on latex.org which explains how to redefine the font size of \itemize and \enumerate items.

While this has fixed the font size of our lists, now our still too small equation will look even more out of place. I learned from this Stack Exchange answer that the \[ and \] math mode separators actually call the equation* environment. With this knowledge, I used the etoolbox package’s \BeforeBeginEnvironment and \AfterEndEnvironment commands to change the font size to LARGE for any equation* environments.

Now we’ve got a much more readable slide that will be automatically replicated for every other slide in our presentation. If you have multi-line equations in your slides, you can similarly redefine the align* environment to enlarge these equations as well.

Don’t forget numbers

As we can see above, our redefinition of the \itemize environment also evenly spaces sub-bullets. However, it doesn’t do anything for numbered lists defined with /enumerate as the slide below shows.

To evenly space items in numbered lists, we just need to take the same changes to the \itemize environment we introduced above, and apply them to the \enumerate environment as well. Unfortunately, I’m not nearly fluent enough in TeX to understand what this code does. Luckily, I know how to run a diff . Diffing two files will point out all differences between the two. By comparing the modified code from Stack Exchange with the original in beamerbaselocalstructure.sty , we can figure out which lines have been added and copy them over to Beamer’s definition of the \enumerate environment.

Essentially, the new code redefines the \itemsep length parameter as \vfill and adds a \vfil at the end of an \itemize environment. \vfil and \vfil are both commands to create vertical space, and this Stack Exchange answer explains the difference between them, but I still have no idea what the difference is after reading it. What matters is that the \enumerate environment definition looks identical to the \itemize one in the lines surrounding the new code (with the substitution of \endenumerate for \enditemize ), which makes it easy to add it to this definition as well.

Once we’ve done that, now numbered lists are also evenly spaced!

All together now

Sticking all of the below in your preamble will greatly improve the visual appeal of your slides with zero effort required on each individual slide.

I’ve combined all of the LaTeX code above into a style file called better-beamer.sty available on my GitHub. To avoid having to copy and paste this code into the preamble of every presentation you make, you can just load the style file instead! If you place the style file into the same directory as your .tex file, you just need to add:

If you want to avoid having to copy the style file every time you make a new presentation, you can just use an absolute path to reference it in your .tex document. On my computer, this looks like this:

One caveat if you use R Markdown like I do. R Markdown relies on pandoc to convert from .Rmd to .md to .tex to .pdf (phew). This only matters if you’re a lazy typist like me and write your

When you write your lists in the former format, pandoc redefines \itemsep to 0pt in any list (bulleted or numbered) environment in the the resulting LaTeX code via the following command:

This will cancel out our redefined list environments and get us back our original cramped lines. There’s no way to disable this \tightlist behavior (short of removing it from the source code and compiling pandoc yourself), but it is very easy to neutralize thanks to the info in this Stack Exchange answer . If you’re using R Markdown, simply add the following to your YAML header under the header-includes variable.

This will come after the \tightlist definition in the preamble and redefine it to do nothing, leaving our properly spaced lists intact without having to add an empty line after every item. At some point I’ll post my custom LaTeX template (with other aesthetic improvements) for Beamer slides via R Markdown and talk about my process for modifying the default template.

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Adding content to an academic website.

August 07, 2020

One thing I haven’t covered in my previous posts on creating and customizing an academic website is how to actually add content to your site. You know, the stuff that’s the reason why people go to your website in the first place? If you’ve followed those guides, your website should be professional looking and already feeling a little bit different from the stock template. However, adding new pages or tweaking the existing pages can be a little intimidating, and I realized I should probably walk through how to do so. Luckily Jekyll’s use of Markdown makes it really easy to add new content!

Customizing an Academic Website

July 06, 2020

This is a followup to my previous post on creating an academic website . If you’ve followed that guide, you should have a website that’s professional-looking and informative, but it’s probably lacking something to really make it feel like your own. There are an infinite number of ways you could customize the academicpages template (many of them far, far beyond my abilities) but I’m going to walk you through the process I used to start tweaking my website. The goal here isn’t to tell you how you should personalize your website, but to give you the tools to learn how to implement whatever changes you want to make.

Building an Academic Website

June 30, 2020

If you’re an academic, you need a website. Obviously I agree with this since you’re reading this on my website, but if you don’t have one, you should get one. Most universities these days provide a free option, usually powered by WordPress (both WashU and UNC use WordPress for their respective offerings). While these sites are quick to set up and come with the prestige of a .edu URL, they have several drawbacks that have been extensively written on .

How to create presentations with Beamer

Vector Open Stock. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Beamer is a LaTeX package for generating presentation slide decks. One of its nicest features is that it can take advantage of LaTeX's powerful typesetting system and all the other packages in its ecosystem. For example, I often use LaTeX's listings package in Beamer presentations that include code.

Starting a presentation

To begin a Beamer document, enter:

As you would with any other LaTeX document, add any packages you want to use. For example, to use the listings package, enter:

Place all content inside the document environment:

Beamer documents are usually a sequence of frame environments. Frames that contain code should be marked fragile :

Begin your frames with a title:

Testing your code before you present it

One of the worst feelings in the world is giving a talk and realizing, as you walk through the code, that there is a glaring bug in it—maybe a misspelled keyword or an unclosed brace.

The solution is to test code that is presented. In most presentation environments, this means creating a separate file, writing tests, then copying and pasting.

However, with Beamer, there is a better way. Imagine you have a file named do_stuff.py that contains code. You can write tests for the do_stuff.py code in a second file, which you call test_do_stuff.py , and can exercise it with, say, pytest . However, most of the lines in do_stuff.py lack pedagogic value, like defining helper functions.

To simplify things for your audience, you can import just the lines you want to talk about into the frame in your presentation :

Since you will be talking through those lines (from 8 to 15), you don't need any other content on the slide. Close the frame:

On the next slide, you want to show a usage example for the do_stuff() function you just presented:

You use the same file, but this time you show the lines that call the function. Finally, close the document:

Assuming you have an appropriate Python file in do_stuff.py , this will produce a short two-slide presentation.

Beamer also supports necessary features such as progressive revelation, showing only one bullet at a time to prevent the audience from being distracted by reading ahead.": \pause inside a list will divide bullets into pages:

Creating handouts

My favorite feature in Beamer is that you can set it to ignore everything outside a frame with \documentclass[ignorenonframetext]{beamer} . When I prepare a presentation, I leave off the top (where the document class is declared) and auto-generate two versions of it: one with Beamer that ignores all text outside any frame, which I use for my presentation, and one with a header like:

which generates a handout—a PDF that has all the frames and all the text between them.

When a conference organizer asks me to publish my slides, I include the original slide deck as a reference, but the main thing I like people to have is the handout, which has all the explanatory text that I don't want to include on the slide deck itself.

When creating presentation slides, people often wonder whether it's better to optimize their materials for the presentation or for people who want to read them afterward. Fortunately, Beamer provides the best of both worlds.

Related Content

Beamer Presentation

This presentation template uses the well-known beamer class and shows how effortless making presentations using LaTeX can be. The template contains extensive commenting which lets you customize your presentation easily, be it to change the layout theme, colors, fonts, font size, text alignment or more. It also features many example slides for virtually any presentation element you may need.

Description

The beamer class is a well-known framework class that enables using LaTeX to create presentations that are highly customizable and easy to write. This template aims to be the definitive beamer template and it does this by containing examples of the most important beamer features as well as by providing examples of virtually every slide element you may need to add to your presentation.

Beamer features a large number of layout themes, primarily named after cities, which act to change the broad layout of the slides. Some are more simple, while others make use of top or side bars to display sections within the presentation and highlight the current slide within them. Beamer also has color themes, which modify the layout themes to change their color in a particular style. For example, the spruce color theme is a light to dark forest green theme reminiscent of a spruce tree. Font themes are mainly used to modify the font styling of structural elements of slides, that is, important thing such as titles, headlines, footlines, sidebars, etc. Finally, inner and outer themes are used to change the styling of elements inside (inner) or outside (outer) the slides. As beamer defines a number of each of the themes described, the template neatly breaks each theme type into blocks and contains all possible options that you can uncomment in turn to see how it changes your presentation.

The template body contains many slides which show examples of common elements used in presentations and how to create them using beamer. This includes things like a presentation table of contents (overview), highlighting text, quotes, lists, colored blocks, multi-column layouts, tables, figures, mathematical theorems/definitions/corollaries/proofs, equations, code and referencing. The template also has examples of creating plain slides with no head and foot lines.

This template was created by Vel .

Current Version

v2.0 (March 8, 2022)

This template is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Click here to see what this license means for your use of the template.

Usage Guide

Compilation.

This template compiles with standard pdflatex. There are no special requirements outside of packages that are supplied with a full distribution of TeX.

Main Presentation Settings

The beamer class implements several class options that make it easy to change major things in your presentation and this section describes the ones that are exposed in this template.

Font Size The first beamer class option you will see at the top of the template is the font size specification. This is set to a default 11pt but you can change this to 8pt, 9pt, 10pt, 11pt, 12pt, 14pt, 17pt or 20pt. It is recommended not to use the smallest or largest values unless you have a specific need for them, but otherwise you can adjust the default font size to suit your content. If you have few words in your presentation, increase the value, if you have many, decrease it.

Vertical Alignment The second beamer class option is a simple t that is commented by default. Uncommenting this option will align content within your slides to the top of the slide, rather than vertically centering it as is the default.

Aspect Ratio The third beamer class option is the ability to change the aspect ratio of the slides, i.e. their dimensions or paper size. If you uncomment this option, you can specify a 2, 3 or 4-digit number corresponding to an aspect ratio. The most common one you might want to use is 169 , which corresponds to an aspect ratio of 16:9, the same as in 1080p and 4K screens and projectors. A value of 42 corresponds to 4:2 and 2013 corresponds to 20:13.

Beamer is highly customizable using multiple types of themes, and this template provides examples of every option for every theme type available to make it easy for you to create a presentation that appeals to you. However, for the sake of brevity, many additional options for themes or detailed explanations of everything each theme does are left out of the template. For this information, it is recommended that you consult the beamer documentation .

Layout Themes Beamer layout themes are specified with the \usetheme command and are usually named after cities. All currently implemented themes are present in the template in the SELECT LAYOUT THEME block, so simply uncomment each line in turn to see how they change your presentation.

Color Themes Beamer color themes are specified with the \usecolortheme command and are usually named after animals. All currently implemented themes are present in the template in the SELECT COLOR THEME block, so simply uncomment each line in turn to see how they change your presentation.

Font Themes Beamer font themes are specified with the \usefonttheme command. All currently implemented themes are present in the template in the SELECT FONT THEME & FONTS block, and comments broadly explain what each theme does. This block also specifies the fonts to use for the presentation and provides several additional options in case you would like to modify the main fonts.

Inner Themes Beamer inner themes are specified with the \useinnertheme command and are named after what they do. All currently implemented themes are present in the template in the SELECT INNER THEME block, so simply uncomment each line in turn to see how they change your presentation.

Outer Themes Beamer outer themes are specified with the \useoutertheme command and are named after what they do. All currently implemented themes are present in the template in the SELECT OUTER THEME block, so simply uncomment each line in turn to see how they change your presentation.

Presentation Information

The PRESENTATION INFORMATION block contains a number of commands that let you specify the main information about your current presentation. This includes the title, subtitle, author(s), institute and date. Each of these further allows you to specify a shortened version in the optional parameter, which appears in the slide footers where there is less space. It is recommended that you carefully read the comments next to each command in this block so you understand how to specify your presentation details. You may use several of the commands, particularly \author , \institute and \date to add additional lines to the presentation, such as to include your email address or the conference/meeting name.

Sectioning in beamer is done using standard \section and \subsection commands. Simply add these throughout your presentation to separate it into major sections and subsections. The table of contents or overview slide simply uses the \tableofcontents command to output the sections and subsections at the beginning of your presentation in a nicely formatted list. Several layout themes also show the sectioning information on all slides.

Creating Slides

Broadly, each slide in a beamer presentation is created using a frame environment. Within this environment, the \frametitle and \framesubtitle commands can be used to add a title and subtitle to the slide. Apart from this, slide content is simply written inside the frame environment using standard text and LaTeX commands. Several custom beamer ways of doing things are present, such as specifying multi-column layouts, and you should refer to the relevant example slide in the template to see how to implement these.

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You can create Beamer (LaTeX/PDF) presentations using the beamer format. Beamer presentations support core presentation features like incremental content and 2-column layouts, and also provide facilities for customizing column layout, specifying frame attributes, and using Beamer themes.

By default, the Beamer format has echo: false and warning: false . As a result, executable code cells in standard Beamer documents won’t show their source or warnings generated. As with other options, you can override this behavior in the document metadata or individually in each executable cell.

See the Beamer format reference for a complete list of all options available for Beamer output.

Creating Slides

In markdown, slides are delineated using headings. For example, here is a simple slide show with two slides (each defined with a level 2 heading ( ## ):

You can also divide slide shows into sections with title slides using a level 1 header ( # ). For example:

Finally, you can also delineate slides using horizontal rules (for example, if you have a slide without a title):

The examples above all use level 2 headings for slides and level 1 headings for sections/title slides. You can customize this using the slide-level option (See the Pandoc documentation on structuring the slide show for additional details.

Incremental Lists

By default number and bullet lists within slides are displayed all at once. You can override this globally using the incremental option. For example:

You can also explicitly make any list incremental or non-incremental by surrounding it in a div with an explicit class that determines the mode. To make a list incremental do this:

To make a list non-incremental do this:

You can also insert a pause within a slide (keeping the content after the pause hidden) by inserting three dots separated by spaces:

Multiple Columns

To put material in side by side columns, you can use a native div container with class .columns , containing two or more div containers with class .column and a width attribute:

The div containers with classes columns and column can optionally have an align attribute. The class columns can optionally have a totalwidth attribute or an onlytextwidth class.

The align attributes on columns and column can be used with the values top , top-baseline , center and bottom to vertically align the columns. It defaults to top in columns .

The totalwidth attribute limits the width of the columns to the given value.

The class onlytextwidth sets the totalwidth to \textwidth .

See Section 12.7 of the Beamer User’s Guide for more details.

Beamer Options

These variables change the appearance of PDF slides using beamer .

slide aspect ratio ( 43 for 4:3 [default], 169 for 16:9, 1610 for 16:10, 149 for 14:9, 141 for 1.41:1, 54 for 5:4, 32 for 3:2)

produce an article from Beamer slides

add extra beamer option with \setbeameroption{}

author affiliations: can be a list when there are multiple authors

logo image for slides

controls navigation symbols (default is empty for no navigation symbols; other valid values are frame , vertical , and horizontal )

enables “title pages” for new sections (default is true)

beamer themes

options for LaTeX beamer themes (a list).

image for title slide

For example, here we use several of these options:

Frame Attributes

Sometimes it is necessary to add the LaTeX [fragile] option to a frame in beamer (for example, when using the minted environment). This can be forced by adding the fragile class to the heading introducing the slide:

All of the other frame attributes described in Section 8.1 of the Beamer User’s Guide may also be used: allowdisplaybreaks , allowframebreaks , b , c , t , environment , label , plain , shrink , standout , noframenumbering .

Background Images

To provide a common background image for all slides in a Beamer presentation, use the background-image format option. For example:

Elegant Slides

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LaTeX beamer template for presentations with a clean and simple style

klb2/beamer-presentation-template

Folders and files, repository files navigation, clean and simple beamer presentation template.

This repository provides a clean and simple template for presentations made with the LaTeX beamer package . The design is based on the metropolis theme .

It is highlighted by many guides on good slide design that slides should contain no clutter and as few objects as possible. Jean-luc Doumont says the following about slide templates in his talk about Creating effective slides :

A template is a way to specify where the content should come and how the content should look once it comes there. As long as you don't have content, there should be nothing.

Usage/Installation

Simply copy all of the files into a new folder or click on "Use this template" on GitHub.

The file presentation.tex is the main file that needs to be compiled. It is recommended to use lualatex , if you want to use the Fira fonts that are the default fonts in the metropolis theme.

Requirements

Make sure that you have a LaTeX installation on your computer, which includes the metropolis theme . It should be included in every popular LaTeX distribution like TeX live or MiKTeX.

If you want to use the Fira fonts , you need to install them on your machine first.

Customization

The template allows an easy customization of the colors and styles according to your needs. In particular, you only need to edit the color definitions in the setup-colors.tex file.

There are four colors in this theme which you can adjust to your needs:

accent : Accent color that is used for the progress bar and \alert{text} .

bgcolor : Main background color that is used as the background color of the slides.

bgcolorAlt : Second/alternative background color that is used as the background color of the slide titles and as the background color for boxes.

fgcolor : Foreground color that is used as the text color.

If you want to show the logo of your institution/university on the title page, you simple need to adjust the \titlegraphic command like

where logo.png refers to the image file of the logo.

The following image shows the provided example slides with an example color scheme.

Beamer Font: Change its Size, Family and style

1. Font size

2. font family, 3. font shape and style, 4. font weight, 5. font themes.

Size is one of the essential properties of a font. The visibility of our content majorly depends on the font size. Predominantly, the Beamer font size was defined in terms of points—for instance, 9 pts, 11 pts, 32 pts, etc .

The following code highlight different Beamer font size that can be obtained using the above commands:

which yields the following output:

Replacing \documentclass{beamer} to \documentclass[14pt]{beamer} , all font sizes will be shifted where the normal size now is 14pt instead of 11pt. Here is the obtained result:

Font family is the second most important property of a Beamer font . Beamer typesets all its text in the Computer modern font . There are three types of CM fonts : CM Roman, CM San Serif and CM Typewriter.

Check the following code to get an idea about setting the font family in Beamer:

which yields the following:

• The used commands are: \rmfamily for CM Roman, \sffamily for CM Sans serif, \ ttfamily for CM Typewriter and \mathrm for CM upright and sans-serif math font.
• We added the option [fragile] to be able to use verbatim inside a frame, a more details can be found in “ Beamer Code Listing — Syntax highlighter ” lesson.

Besides the font family, beamer has two font series which decide the stroke intensity of the font. The two types of series are : regular and bold . These are obtained using the commands \mdseries and \bfseries , resepectively.

The upright shape is the default shape for the normal text . The slanted and italics text are seldom used in presentations. The italics font will look same as slant font if the sans-serif font family is used. To have a Times italics effect, the serif font family is mandatory. Italics font shape is used for math. However, the practice of using bold colored text for highlighting is recommended .

The last shape is the small caps . This shape uses smaller versions of the uppercase letters for normal typesetting lowercase letters .

The thickness of the font is referred to as the font weight. The two weights that are often used are : regular and bold . The bold text is used to create emphasis on a particular topic. The other font weights available in beamer are semibold , ultrabold , thin , and ultrathin .

In this section, we will learn the different pre-defined font themes in beamer . These themes can be used to change the global structure of the presentation.

– Theme font: Default

The default font theme installs sans serif font for all text of the presentation and installs different font sizes for elements like titles, headlines and footlines, but does not use boldface or italics for “highlighting.”

Consider the following code that loads the default font theme:

Compiling this code yields:

– Theme font: professionalfonts

Using \usefonttheme{professionalfonts} instead of \usefonttheme{default} in the above code, we get the following result:

– Theme font: serif

This theme causes all text to be typeset using the default serif font.

– Theme font: structurebold

This font them e will cause titles and text in the headlines, footlines , and sidebars to be typeset in a bold font.

– Theme font: structureitalicserif

This theme is similarly as the structurebold font theme, but where structurebold makes text bold, this theme typesets it in italics and in the standard serif font.

– Theme font: structuresmallcapsserif

Again, this theme does exactly the same as the structurebold font theme, only this time text is set using small caps and a serif font.

• In this lesson, we presented different commands and options to change Beamer font size, shape and family. Moreover, we highlighted different available theme fonts.

Next Lesson:  14 Beamer Table – Full guide with examples