On Tuesday 08 June 2010 03:24:01 Daniel Lohmann wrote:
> Steve (and others),
>
> I know that you a are a friend of pragmatic solutions (recalling the
> recurring discussion on how to do the front matter), so here is mine with
> respect to beamer, which kind of resembles your front-matter approach :-)
>
> I tried for about a day to implement my group's slide style with beamer,
> including a logo on every slide, of course, but also some other graphical
> elements. (If there is one thing I really dislike about beamer than it are
> the standard styles. I have seen them just too many times, they look all
> the same. IMHO, it should not be overly obvious to the audience which tool
> the presenter has used to create her presentation!)
>
> After fiddling around just too long with pgfimage and Co I gave up and went
> for the brute force approach. I "draw" the slide style with my graphics
> program of choice into an PDF image of exactly 128x96 mm (the dimensions
> of a beamer slide). Then I install this as the "background" image on every
> page. I do not use any additional beamer style stuff, and -- voila, there
> we are. In the style file this looks as follows:
>
> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
> % background image setup
> %
> % This is the real trick :-) All graphical elements of the i4-layout are
> just % in the background image. To support the "plain"-option for frames,
> we actually % need two different background images (and probably a third
> one for the title % slide, don't know yet)
> %
> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
> \usebackgroundtemplate{
> \ifbea...@plainframe%
> \includegraphics[width=\paperwidth]{beamerthemei4_bgplain}%
> \else %
> \includegraphics[width=\paperwidth]{beamerthemei4_bg}
> \fi%
> }
>
> Of course, this approach is not really the "beamer philosophy". You cannot
> combine it as smoothly with outer styles, inner styles, and all this stuff
> ... but what the heck -- I do not need (pseudo-) variety, I need just ONE
> style "done right".
>
> Here is a link to an example presentation:
>
> http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/Publications/2010/urban_10_aosd-slid
> es.pdf
>
> Daniel
Nice! You can put your logo anywhere you want. You can have two logos. You can
have any repeating graphic.
I should have thought of this myself, because philosophically, it's just like
my frequent admonition to "fingerpaint the frontmatter."
/* NOTE: I wrote the preceding sentence before I saw that you had already made
this very point */
Daniel, your solution inspired me to solve the other Beamer problem I'd been
having. I enjoy having text blocks in my presentations where the text block is
maybe 60% of the width, and centered. The width of a Beamer block can be
altered by a \setlength{\textwidth}, but no matter what I did with \center,
\centering, \hskip, \leftskip, I couldn't center it.
So finally I used columns, ONLY on the text block. Here's how I did it:
%===================================
\begin{frame}
\frametitle{Block of Text}
\begin{itemize}
\item This is line 1
\item This is line 2
\vskip 4pt
\begin{columns}[c]
\column{.20\textwidth}
\column{.60\textwidth}
\begin{block}{This Is a Block}
Steve was here
and now is gone
but left his name
to carry on.
\vskip 5pt
As you can see, this is a block with lots of text.
\end{block}
\column{.20\textwidth}
\end{columns}
\vskip 10pt
\item This is line 3
\item This is line 4
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%===================================
Daniel -- thanks so much for solving this problem. It was really bothering me.
Now I feel a lot better about moving forward with Beamer.
Ehud and Daniel, what other Beamer difficulties can you think of? I'm having a
lot of trouble getting onto the Beamer-Latex mailing list, so this is the most
authoritative Beamer knowledge source I have.
Thanks
SteveT
Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt
