Beamer mtheme

The mtheme is a Beamer theme with minimal visual. The core design principles of the theme were described in a blog post. Not convinced? Have a look at the demo slides.

Installation

To install the theme either run make install or copy the style files ending with .sty to the source files of your presentation. As of now, fonts, colors and the section indicator are hardcoded into the theme. For the demo you need

• XeLaTeX,
• the Fira Sans and Mono font and
• TikZ.

Depending on the Linux distribution, the packaged name of Fira Sans might be Fira Sans OT instead of Fira Sans. In that case, you may have to edit beamerfontthememetropolis.sty. You may also need to install Fira Sans; see the contrib/ directory for more. Users of Debian or Ubuntu can also install this .deb package containing the theme files as well as the Fira Sans font files.

To build the demo slides run

$ make

in the top-level directory.

To use this theme with Pandoc-based presentations, you can run the following command

$ pandoc -t beamer --latex-engine=xelatex -V theme:m -o output.pdf input.md

Customization

Package options

To use any of options below, call them when invoking mtheme in the preamble of the slides, i.e.

\usetheme[<options>]{m}

• The usetitleprogressbar option adds a thin progress bar similar to the section progress bar underneath each frame title

  

• In order to use \cite, \ref and similar commands in a frame title you have to protect the title. This can be done automatically with the protectframetitle option.

• The blockbg option defines extra colors used in defining the blocks. The blocks then have a gray background similar to other beamer themes.

• By default, this package adds \vspace{2em} after the frametitle to center content vertically on the frame. If using more content per slide, this can be turned off at the package-level by passing the nooffset option.

• With option nosectionslide, no dedicated slide is produced when a new section starts. By default when using the \section command, a slide is created with just the title on it.

• Option usetotalslideindicator creates slide numbering in lower right corner in following format: #current/#total. By default, just current page number is printed.

• Option noslidenumbers omits slide numbers entirely.

Color customization

The included metropolis color theme is used by default, but its colours can be easily changed to suit your tastes. All of the theme's styles are defined in terms of three beamer colors:

• normal text (dark fg, light bg)
• alerted text (colored fg, should be visible against dark or light)
• example text (colored fg, should be visible against dark or light)

An easy way to customize the theme is to redefine these colors using

\setbeamercolor{ ... }{ fg= ... , bg= ... }

in your preamble. For greater customization, you can redefine any of the other colors in beamercolorthememetropolis, including progress bar.

Title formatting

The main title, section titles, and frame titles are all formatted according to the custom command \mthemetitleformat. By default, this is equivalent to scshape and sets the titles in small capitals, but you can change it in your preamble. For example:

\renewcommand{\mthemetitleformat}{}                       % no small capitals
\renewcommand{\mthemetitleformat}{\scshape\MakeLowercase} % all small capitals
\renewcommand{\mthemetitleformat}{\MakeUppercase}         % all capitals

Note that \MakeLowercase and \MakeUppercase can have unexpected behaviour in math mode, are disabled when protectframetitle is used, and cause crashes when an unprotected frametitle appears on a slide with allowframebreaks.

Commands

The \plain{title=[]}{body} command sets a slide in plain dark colors which can be useful to focus attentation on a single image.

pgfplot styles

The beamer theme also contains pre-defined pgfplot styles. Use the mlineplot key to plot line data and mbarplot or horizontal mbarplot to plot bar charts.

License

The theme itself is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This means that if you change the theme and re-distribute it, you must retain the copyright notice header and license it under the same CC-BY-SA license. This does not affect the presentation that you create with the theme.