Get started with the

UIC Beamer Theme

Using LATEX to prepare slides
Usama Muneeb
December 7, 2024
 Beamer for UIC presentations
A quick start

If you would like LATEX in your presentation, Beamer is a great way to go!
• Beamer has a detailed user manual, but we will go over the most common
features.
• This template is designed for a 16:9 aspect ratio, which is the default in
PowerPoint and the most common amongst projectors.
• The most common of all slide types involve bulleted points, like these.

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 Beamer for UIC presentations
A quick start

If you would like LATEX in your presentation, Beamer is a great way to go!
• Beamer has a detailed user manual, but we will go over the most common
features.
• This template is designed for a 16:9 aspect ratio, which is the default in
PowerPoint and the most common amongst projectors.
• The most common of all slide types involve bulleted points, like these.
— Placing \pause after items will allow you to sequentially unroll points.
— Changing \begin{itemize} to \begin{itemize}[<+->] achieves a similar effect,
although \pause gives finer control on the unrolling.

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Slide Layouts

Some standard slide layouts

 Images, columns and tips for good slides
Do use this optional subtitle where appropriate

• Do keep a good balance between text and figures.

— Do use nested lists wherever appropriate.
• Do use the \underbrace and \overbrace commands
to help explain your equations:

Lagrangian
z }| {
max . inf L(x, λ, ν)
x
λ,ν
| {z } Figure: Minimum fuel
Lagrange Dual Function trajectory
s.t. λ≥0

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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.
• The highlighting may span multiple slides in a frame.
— Previous one did not, but this one will.
• This is accomplished by the hyphen (i.e. -) in the \alert<3-> command.

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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.
• The highlighting may span multiple slides in a frame.
— Previous one did not, but this one will.
• This is accomplished by the hyphen (i.e. -) in the \alert<3-> command.

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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.
• The highlighting may span multiple slides in a frame.
— Previous one did not, but this one will.
• This is accomplished by the hyphen (i.e. -) in the \alert<3-> command.

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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.
• The highlighting may span multiple slides in a frame.
— Previous one did not, but this one will.
• This is accomplished by the hyphen (i.e. -) in the \alert<3-> command.

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 Another images/columns example
Placeholder

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
Placeholder

Some content will just look better in blocks.

Block title Block title

This is a block. Its color will This Beamer theme also provides a colorblock
match the color of the footline. environment which is a wrapper on top of the usual
The block environment is native block environment in Beamer. It allows you to
to Beamer. specify a custom background and font color.

Here’s an example usage:

The discrete case The continuous case

... ...

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 Blocks for theorems
Placeholder

Beamer also uses blocks by default to wrap theorems.

Theorem
This is a theorem.

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 Side-Picture Slides
Placeholder

This Beamer theme also provides a sidepic envi-

ronment which is a wrapper on top of the frame en-
vironment.
• It has an optional image argument which will
help you achieve a layout of this type.

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 Pseudocode Example
Placeholder

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
 Typesetting Algorithms
Common Issues

• There are multiple environments for typesetting algorithms.

— This template uses algorithmicx via algpseudocode.
◦ algpseudocode is (one of the) layouts for algorithmicx.
◦ Others exist, as mentioned in the documentation, section 2.1.
— algorithmic is also widely used, which is an alternative to using algorithmicx
(via a layout package).
• While algpseudocode tries to be close to algorithmic, they use different
capitalization schemes
— algorithmic commands are fully capitalized (e.g. \STATE, \FORALL)
— algpseudocode commands are not (e.g. \State, \ForAll).
— If moving an algorithm from one to the other, you will need to fix the
capitalization, or the compiler will run into problems.

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 Typesetting Algorithms
More control

• If you must use algorithmic instead of algpseudocode, some commands will

need to be manually defined
— For example the function \Call (or rather, the \CALL) command.
◦ Do it as \newcommand*\CALL[2]{\textsc{#1}(#2)}
◦ Remember that not all fonts have a small caps variant needed by \textsc
◦ You can look at uicfont.sty to see how we augment our font with another small caps
font (i.e. PlayFair Display SC)
— Additionally, the \Comment of algpseudocode might look better than the \COMMENT
of algorithmic
◦ You can define a custom one to mimic \Comment
◦ Do it as \newcommand*\ANNOTATE[1]{\hfill\(\triangleright\) #1}

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 Common issues (this is P̂ laceholder math)
Placeholder

• Math in title will cause its height to be inconsistent with that of other frames (try
viewing these example slides in a full screen mode)
— This theme provides a \titlemanualoffset register which can be used to
manually adjust this offset.
◦ Putting \setlength{\titlemanualoffset}{<some calibrated offset>} before
\begin{frame} for this frame will fix this issue.
◦ Make sure to zero it out after \end{frame}
• If you use \verb command (or \begin{verbatim} environment) in a frame,
make sure to specify the [fragile] option in \begin{frame} otherwise the
compiler will run into problems.
— In most cases, \texttt can be used instead of \verb, and it does not require the
[fragile] option.

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 Avoid duplicate logos
Placeholder

If using a logo based background, you can disable the logo in the top left by temporarily
switching to a color scheme that does not use a logo. The next slide is such an example.

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Personalization

Fonts and color schemes

 If you need more space in slides
Placeholder

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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 Color schemes
Placeholder

Three fundamental features greatly affect the look and feel of your slides. Two of them
can be controlled with the \themecolor command (provided by this theme).
• 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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 Color schemes
Placeholder

• 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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 UIC Colors
Placeholder

• 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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 Fonts
Placeholder

Fonts are categorized as Serif and Sans-Serif (see this link for when to use which).
• Open Sans and IBM Plex Serif have been provided with this template.
• Beamer uses Sans-Serif mode by default.
— To switch to Serif mode, please change \usefonttheme[onlymath]{serif} to
\usefonttheme{serif} in the preamble.
• If you want to mix and match Serif and Sans-Serif
— You can still typeset in Serif font in Sans-Serif mode (and vice versa) using \textrm
and \textsf commands.
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
Placeholder

Here are the old formats (still used in the LaTeX ecosystem):
• PostScript Type 1 format developed by Adobe in the 1980s
— Authoring 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
Placeholder

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 pdfLaTeX-ready font packages in your TeX distribution (exhaustive list provided in
the LaTeX Font Catalog).

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 Font formats compatibility
Placeholder

If you want to use fonts beyond those in the LaTeX Font Catalog (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.
• If pdfLaTeX is used, font packages from your TeX distribution will be used instead.
UIC signature font is Theinhardt, which is a proprietary font.
• UIC provides Theinhardt, but proprietary fonts sometimes do not permit PDF
embedding which might cause substitutions or compatibility issues.
— This template uses Open Sans which has wider spacing and offers more clarity in a
scientific setting than Theinhardt. Additionally, it’s OFL licensed.

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 Chapter slides
Placeholder

• 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
Placeholder

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

• Download your logo from here.
— What you need is “departmental lockup in EPS format and RGB/inverted RGB color”.
• Overlay it on a static background
— Upload your EPS logo to this Overleaf and use the overlay_eps.tex file to
superimpose it onto a static background.
◦ Copy over the resulting PDF to the assets folder.
— If EPS logo is not available, download an SVG version and 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!
Placeholder

• 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!