Customising Beamer Presentations

Someone asked me how I achieved the effects on my slides in the talk I gave at QMUL, so having written them an email outlining all the customisations I usually make, I thought the subject might be worthy of a blogpost.

I use the Beamer package for LaTeX which is a great way to include mathematics in your slides, and is pretty straightforward to use if you are proficient with LaTeX. The default settings in Beamer are quite pretty but after a few days of a physics conference they can become quite repetitive. I like to make my slides at least somewhat different to all the others out there, and try to use my customisations to keep the attention of my audience.

One main change I think is useful with beamer is to make the equations use a serif font like a normal paper would, and not the sans-serif font used by default. This is achieved by having the following command before \begin{document}:

\usefonttheme[onlymath]{serif}

To get rid of the navigation symbols at the bottom right of each slide I use

\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}

and the template I use is given by

\usetheme{Frankfurt}
\usecolortheme{rose}
\usecolortheme{seahorse}

I don’t like all the clutter that’s normally at the top of each slide (contents, title etc) so I use the “plain” option for each frame:

\begin{frame}[plain]
...
\end{frame}

To do the black background with white text is slightly tricky but the template below should work. Just be aware that the curly brackets outside all the other commands are required to limit the change to just one frame.

{
\setbeamercolor{normal text}{bg=black}
\setbeamercolor{whitetext}{fg=white}
\begin{frame}[plain]{}
\begin{center}
{\usebeamercolor[fg]{whitetext}

INSERT TEXT HERE

}
 \end{center}

\end{frame}
}

These are pretty simple changes but used judiciously they can have a striking effect. I think the most useful is the change of maths text to be serif, in line with the standard used in academic print. The sans-serif maths font just looks a little odd in comparison.