Recently, I started using beamer for creating slides with LaTeX. My intention was to mimic, to a sensible extend, the available design of my slides in power point. This circles around three main issues:
- A custom color for headlines, titles, etc.
- A footline that displays the title, author, institute, date and slide number in two lines
- Logos at the right top and left bottom of each slide
None of the available beamer themes truly met my requirements, so I started to customize the default theme. It took some time and a lot of manual reading, so I am providing my solutions for these requirements. Due to the amount of code required, I will release the complete template in multiple posts.
The first issue, A custom color for headlines, titles, etc., was pretty easy to solve by customizing the color theme of certain beamer elements in my preamble.
\definecolor{UniBlue}{RGB}{83,121,170}
\setbeamercolor{title}{fg=UniBlue}
\setbeamercolor{frametitle}{fg=UniBlue}
\setbeamercolor{structure}{fg=UniBlue}
\definecolor is a standard command from the color package. \setbeamercolor can be used to change the default color of certain beamer elements. In the example, the elements title and frametitle should be self-explanatory. structure refers to elements such as bullet points. Unfortunately, the beamer documentation leaves no hint as to what beamer elements actually exist. A quite comprehensive list can be found here. fg sets the foreground color. The other option is bg for background. The command also comes in a starred version, \setbeamercolor*, which is useful if there are cummulative calls of the command for the same beamer element. The starred version first resets all configurations to their default values, while the non-starred version only changes the specified configurations. So, to change the color for the same element multiple times without side effects, use \setbeamercolor*.
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Thanks, this is very nice!
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This posting answered a question I had, about changing color of the frame title. I used the same \setbeamercolor{frametitle}…
The difference between what you do and I tried is that I did not add the “fg=” in front of the color name.
So here is my question, as I struggle to figure out the very mild customization of the default theme: where is such detailed info to be found? You mentioned a lot of reading. Any suggested venue (in English or French, sorry) beyond the user manual?
Thanks, –Micha Hofri
Hi Micha,
at the time I was building this, the only definite source I had was the manual. When the manual did not make sense to me, I googled my issue and fixed things through reading blog posts, mailing lists, and trial and error. But I don’t have a definite and nice to read source for beamer.
One blog I concerning LaTeX I follow is this one: http://texblog.org/ There are also some posts on beamer there, maybe it is of help to you.
Regards, Jörg