My LaTeX customization page

The progressbar Beamer theme (version 0.4)

New (21st October, 2009) : A few bugs have been corrected. Mainly some bugs appearing with empty fields (section, date, author, institute, ...), and some annoying incompatibility between TikZ and babel (with french among others). Keep sending comments and questions!
New (22nd October, 2009) : The appendix feature has been added. A few other bugs corrected. A FAQ section has been added on this page.

Features

This package is an attempt to build an alternative theme for LaTeX Beamer. At the beginning I tried to minimize the place allowed to the head and foot lines, while displaying useful informations such as the names of the sections, the title of the presentation and the current frame number.

In the last (0.4) version, I made some major esthetic adjustements, removed the headline, changed the way the frame titles are displayed, added a picture, changed the style of the progressbar, of the blocks, and of the bib item. You can tune the theme using \progressbaroptions (see below). There is also a better handout mode management that won't empty your printer's ink cartridge when you print your slides (another way to say that the background is white in handout mode).

The progressbar is still there, still useless, and will still for sure impress your audience.

The last version should work with other color / font themes, but maybe in a weird way (actually I didn't test this feature extensively). I suggest you to write your own color theme starting from mine if necessary. Of course if you don't like the last progressbar theme version, you can still download the old versions (scroll down to the middle of the page).

Several people have sent some comments and questions. Many thanks to all of them ! I did not have time to take all the remarks into account since the last version of the theme. Anyway, you can still send me some questions and comments, which are greatly appreciated.

Screenshots - version 0.4

(screenshot) (screenshot)
One slide with the new (default) version of the headline and frame title (\progressbaroptions{headline=none,frametitle=picture-section}). The new (default) version of the title page (\progressbaroptions{titlepage=picture}).
(screenshot) (screenshot)
One slide with the old version of the headline and frame title (\progressbaroptions{headline=sections,frametitle=normal}). The old version of the title page (\progressbaroptions{titlepage=normal}).

Screenshots - version 0.32

(screenshot) (screenshot)
One typical slide with a bibliography item. The main title slide.
(screenshot) (screenshot)
Another color theme (crane). Another color theme (albatross).

Download

How to use it

  • Download the .zip (or .tar.gz) file (and unzip it) or the .sty files.
  • Copy the .sty files in the directory of your .tex file (or somewhere else, where LaTeX can find them).
  • Depending on which part of the theme you want to use (whole theme, color theme, font theme, outer theme, inner theme), include \usetheme{progressbar} (or \usecolortheme{progressbar}, \usefonttheme{progressbar}, \useoutertheme{progressbar}, \useinnertheme{progressbar}) in your .tex file.
  • New feature in version 0.4: You can use different kinds of styles for headlines, frame titles and title page. You can switch from one style to another one by using \progressbaroptions{x=...} in your .tex file, where the different values for x are the following:
    • headline - two possible values : headline=none (default), displaying an empty headline (screenshot 1), or headline=sections, displaying the section list in the headline, as in earlier versions (screenshot 3).
    • frametitle - three possible values : frametitle=picture-section (default), displaying the section, a picture, and the frametitle (screenshot 1), frametitle=picture-subsection (default), displaying the section, the subsection, a picture, and the frametitle, or frametitle=normal, displaying only the centered frametitle, as in earlier versions (screenshot 3).
    • titlepage - two possible values : titlepage=picture (default), displaying a picture in the title page (screenshot 2), or frametitle=normal, displaying no picture, as in the earlier versions (screenshot 4).
    • imagename : you can specify the picture to be displayed in the title page and frame titles (default: images/tree04).
    You can specify several options at the same time. You can change the options whenever you want in the .tex file.
  • New feature in version 0.4: The macro \appendix has been redefined. If you use it without any argument, it will just stop counting the number of frames: the total number of frames (displayed in the footline and used to draw the progressbar) will then be equal to the total number of frames without those appearing after this command (thus the slides in appendix do not appear in the main part of the talk). If you use an optional argument (e.g. \appendix[Appendix]), it will also display a plain frame with the argument only.

Changes from version 0.3x to version 0.4

  • New design for progressbar, bibliography item, blocks.
  • Picture added in the title page and frame title.
  • A way to customize the theme with \progressbaroptions.
  • A different style for handout mode.

Changes from version 0.3 to version 0.32

  • Bug of empty institute fixed (reported by F. B. -> many thanks to him !).
  • Headline text alignment fixed: the section boxes were bottom-aligned, instead of being aligned using their baseline.
  • Package version number corrected in the file headers.

Changes from version 0.2 to version 0.3

  • Bug fixed (reported by V. S. -> many thanks to him !) : drawing the progressbar on the very first slide of a presentation produced corrupted PS-files.
  • \RequirePackage{tikz} added where necessary.
  • minor changes in the font theme.

Older versions

Frequently Asked Questions...

Answers to some questions that actual people asked to me. I hope this will help others also.
How can I insert bibliographic references on the same slide as they are cited and inside a beautiful frame, like in Screenshot 1 ?
There are probably several ways of doing this. I personnally use the bibunits package, that generates local bibliographies. Bibunits is already inserted by default in the progressbar theme (if you use one of the last versions). Here is how you can use bibunits:
  1. Surround your citations by \begin{bibunits} and \end{bibunits} to make your bibliography local.
  2. Use \biblio{...} to insert the local bibliography (this macro is defined in the progresbar theme and takes the name of the bib file as argument). Here is for example the code that generated the slide on screenshot 1: 
    \begin{bibunit}[apalike]
  \begin{frame}{CP-nets \cite{Boutilier04a}}
    \begin{exampleblock}{Example}
      ...
    \end{exampleblock}

    \begin{itemize}
    \item \textbf{CP-nets}: $a: b \triangleright \overline{b}$;
    \item whereas we want: $a: b \triangleright c$.
    \end{itemize}
    \vfill
    \biblio{partage}
  \end{frame}
\end{bibunit}
  3. Compile your .tex file. It creates one file bu*.aux per bibunit. You then have to run bibtex on each one of these files. If you are lazy and if you use a bash-like shell, you can use the following script to compile them at once: 
    for f in bu*.aux; do
  bibtex $f
done
How can I make the same title page as the one that is shown in screenshot 2 ?
Just use the standard titlepage macro (with the following values for title, subtitle, author and date): 
\title[CI-nets: A Graphical Language for Representing Ordinal, Monotonic Preferences over Sets of Goods] {Conditional Importance Networks}
\subtitle{A Graphical Language for Representing Ordinal, Monotonic Preferences over Sets of Goods}

\author{\parbox[t]{2.2cm}{\hfill Sylvain Bouveret\hfill\ \\\hbox{} \hfill{\tiny Onera Toulouse}\hfill\hbox{}}
        \parbox[t]{2.2cm}{\hfill Ulle Endriss\hfill\ \\\hbox{} \hfill{\tiny University of Amsterdam}\hfill \hbox{}}
	\parbox[t]{2.2cm}{\hfill Jérôme Lang\hfill\ \\\hbox{} \hfill{\tiny Université Paris Dauphine}\hfill \hbox{}}\\\ }

\date{International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, July 16, 2009}

The diffs package...

I wrote this little package for managing some issues in multi-writers working papers. It provides a few macros that allow for making comments in the text, and making changes (like adding or removing text) appear with the name of the writer that performed the change.

You can download the package and the user guide.