Get started with the

UIC Beamer Theme

Using LATEX to prepare slides
Usama Muneeb
June 13, 2024
 Beamer for UIC presentations
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If you would like LATEXin your presentation, Beamer is a great way to go!
• Beamer has a detailed user manual, but we will go over the most common
features.
• The most common of all slide types involve bulleted points, like these.
• Regular LATEXcommands will help you type math, as below.

∂ ℏ2 2
iℏ Ψ(r, t) = − ∇ Ψ(r, t) + V(r)Ψ(r, t)
∂t 2m

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Slide Layouts

An overview of some different

slide types you can have.
 More with bullet points
Unrolling

• You could also unroll the slides in a sequence.

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 More with bullet points
Unrolling

• You could also unroll the slides in a sequence.

• Just added [<+->] option to \begin{itemize} in this frame.

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 More with bullet points
Unrolling

• You could also unroll the slides in a sequence.

• Just added [<+->] option to \begin{itemize} in this frame.
• Note: If you use verbatim test (i.e. the \verb command) in a frame, the
[fragile] option must be specified on the frame, otherwise the compiler will
run into problems.

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 More with bullet points
Alerts and repeats

Sections 12.1 through 12.3 of the Beamer user manual demonstrate many more
features, like alerts and repeats.
• The \alert{} feature can be particularly useful.
• Like this.
• You may as well choose the highlighting to stick.
— Previous one did not, but this one will.
• Another common slide type involves columns and/or images.
— We show them in the next slides.

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 More with bullet points
Alerts and repeats

Sections 12.1 through 12.3 of the Beamer user manual demonstrate many more
features, like alerts and repeats.
• The \alert{} feature can be particularly useful.
• Like this.
• You may as well choose the highlighting to stick.
— Previous one did not, but this one will.
• Another common slide type involves columns and/or images.
— We show them in the next slides.

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 More with bullet points
Alerts and repeats

Sections 12.1 through 12.3 of the Beamer user manual demonstrate many more
features, like alerts and repeats.
• The \alert{} feature can be particularly useful.
• Like this.
• You may as well choose the highlighting to stick.
— Previous one did not, but this one will.
• Another common slide type involves columns and/or images.
— We show them in the next slides.

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 More with bullet points
Alerts and repeats

Sections 12.1 through 12.3 of the Beamer user manual demonstrate many more
features, like alerts and repeats.
• The \alert{} feature can be particularly useful.
• Like this.
• You may as well choose the highlighting to stick.
— Previous one did not, but this one will.
• Another common slide type involves columns and/or images.
— We show them in the next slides.

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 Images and columns
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Adding images works like in normal LATEX:

Code for Adding Images

\usepackage{graphicx}
% ...
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]
{images/uic_quad.pdf}

This slide layout was achieved using the columns feature.

The number and widths of the columns is totally user
preference. Another columns example follows on the next
slide.

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 Another images/columns example
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Left: Solving for optimal

fuel consumption Right:
Solving for optimal time
taken

Figure: Minimum fuel trajectory Figure: Minimum time trajectory

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 Blocks
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Blocks are another great way to partition your slide. They can be combined with
columns, as shown here.

Standard Blocks
For the light theme, their Color Blocks
color matches the Similar to the ones on the left, but you pick the color. Text
footline. We will discuss will be white by default, but you may set it with an optional
light and dark themes argument.
soon.
\begin{colorblock}[black]{uihteal}{title}
\begin{block}{title} content...
content... \end{colorblock}
\end{block}

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 Blocks for theorems
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Beamer also uses blocks by default to wrap theorems.

Theorem
This is a theorem.

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 Side-Picture Slides
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Just another another layout you may want to use.

• These type of slides are created using
\begin{sidepic}{<image>}{<title>}
• Otherwise, sidepic works just like frame

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 Pseudocode Example
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Algorithm Bellman-Kalaba (adapted from algorithmicx documentation).

Input: G, u, l, p
for all v ∈ V(G) do
l(v) ← ∞
end for
l(u) ← 0
repeat
for i ← 1, n do
min ← l(vi )
for j ← 1, n do
if min > Edge(vi , vj ) + l(vj ) then
min ← Edge(vi , vj ) + l(vj ) ▷ Example comment
p(i) ← vj
end if
end for
l’(i) ← min
end for
changed ← l ̸= l’
l ← l’
until ¬changed
Personalization

Themes, fonts and colors

 If you need more space in slides
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If you would like more space, you can control the font size by specifying an option in
the \documentclass command at the beginning of this file.
• Use \documentclass[smaller]{beamer} to reduce font size.
• For all options, refer to Section 18.2.1 of the Beamer user manual.

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 Let’s talk themes
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Three fundamental features greatly affect the look and feel of your slides. Two of them
can be controlled with the \themecolor command.
• The background color.
— The default is light theme, which has a light background, which we are currently
using.
• The foreground color.
— The light theme has a dark foreground (i.e. text color) and vice versa.
• The third, the footer color can be set using \footlinecolor command.
— We are currently using test uicblue color for our footer.
— The default is no footline, but I believe page numbers are incredibly helpful for your
audience to ask questions later.

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 Let’s talk themes
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• I just called \themecolor{dark} before \begin{frame} for this slide.

— Ideally you should set the theme globally in the preamble (i.e. before
\begin{document}). Default is light.
• You can also change the footer color with \footlinecolor{color}, as we did
for this slide.
• All the changes we talked about here happen for the current as well as
subsequent frames.
— I will manually revert all the changes for the next slide.

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 Fonts
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• Fonts are categorized as Serif and Sans-Serif (this is a good read on when to use
which).
— While it’s possible to use different fonts for different elements, it is usually sufficient
to specify your desired Serif and Sans-Serif font to LaTeX (and then use either the
Serif or the Sans-Serif mode for the whole document).
— Beamer uses Sans-Serif mode by default.
— You can still typeset in Serif font in Sans-Serif mode (and vice versa).
• Open Sans and IBM Plex Serif have been provided with this template.
— To conveniently switch from Open Sans to IBM Plex Serif, please change
\usefonttheme[onlymath]{serif} to \usefonttheme{serif} in the preamble.
— IBM Plex Serif is not available on pdfLaTeX, so Caladea will be used instead.
— For more options with fonts, you need to modify the self explanatory uicfont.sty
file. Next few slides will be helpful in this regard.

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 Font formats over time
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Here are the old formats (still used in the LaTeX ecosystem):
• PostScript Type 1 format developed by Adobe in 1980s
— Support officially ended by Adobe in January 2023
• TrueType format (.ttf) developed by Apple, also in 1980s, licensed to Microsoft
The new font formats are OpenType, developed jointly by Microsoft and Adobe in the
1990s as an extension of Apple’s TrueType font format. OpenType fonts are either
• PostScript flavor OpenType (.otf) that supercedes Adobe’s PostScript Type 1
• TrueType flavor OpenType (also .ttf!) that supercedes Apple’s TrueType
— Distinguishing them from the old TrueType format is non trivial, since they have the
same file extension.

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 Font formats compatibility
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The new OpenType fonts have several new features over the old formats. They are
however, supported natively only by XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX compilers. The most
popular pdfLaTeX compiler has limited support for them:
• OpenType fonts are not pdfLaTeX-ready by default.
• They require the production of TeX font metrics and other ancillary files in order
to be used with LaTeX.
• The production of these files is not easy for the average user.
Consequently, if using pdfLaTeX, the most convenient option is to restrict yourself to
the fonts packages available at the LaTeX Font Catalogue, which are already
pdfLaTeX-ready.

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 Font formats compatibility
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If you want to use fonts beyond those in the LaTeX Font Catalogue (for example, fonts
from Google Fonts), the recommended approach is to use XeLaTeX.
• XeLaTeX is set as the default compiler on the Overleaf version of this template.
• The fonts included in the fonts folder are TrueType flavor OpenType fonts.
• You can still use pdfLaTeX, except that the included fonts will not be applied.
UIC signature font is Theinhardt, also available as OpenType.
• Due to licensing issues, I cannot distribute Theinhardt with this template.
• A licensed copy of Theinhardt can be obtained by UIC students and faculty here.

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 Text color
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• Font color can be set with the \textcolor{<color name>}{text} command.

• The colors are defined in the uiccolor package, in accordance with the UIC
Visual Elements guide:
— UIC’s primary colors are Navy Pier Blue ( test uicblue) and Fire Engine Red
( test uicred).
— UIC’s secondary colors are Chicago Blue ( test chicagoblue), UI Health Teal
( test uihteal) and Champions Gold ( test championsgold).
— UIC’s neutral colors are Expo White ( test expowhite) and Steel Gray
( test steelgray or test steelgrey).
• A simpler alternative to font colors is often just \emph{}.

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 Chapter slides
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• Allow you to partition your presentation into multiple chapters

• Also frames, but with a few more options
• Created with \begin{chapter}[<image>]{<color>}{<title>}
— Image is optional, color and title are mandatory.
• Multiple background images have been provided in this template which may be
used for chapter slides:
— Some campus photos that I have taken over the years and;
— some departmental logos.
— Let’s look at a few examples!

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Title goes here

Subtitle goes here

Title goes here

Subtitle goes here

Title goes here

Subtitle goes here

Title goes here

Subtitle goes here

 Other departments
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• You can use the generic uic_lockup.png background, or

• Download your logo from here.
— What you need is “departmental lockup in SVG format and inverted RGB color”.
• Overlay it on a static background (LaTeX cannot natively handle SVG images)
— Use the overlay_svg.py Python script provided in the GitHub repository of this
template (link on next slide)

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 Good luck with your presentation!
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• This template is hosted on GitHub

— https://github.com/usamamuneeb/uic-beamer-template
• I would appreciate contributions of all sorts (pull requests, identifying issues, etc).
• If you have any suggestions, send them to me!

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Thank you!