A Taste of the Beamer LaTeX Class Using Torino Theme

Lighton Phiri

tl;dr
LaTeX source files are on my github account [1]… Use R Sweave command to generate TeX file. Thereafter, run latex on resulting TeX file and then dvipdf to generate final pdf output –pdflatex will NOT work with PSTricks and so you need to run latex to generate a dvi file.

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I was attending this year’s 14th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL 2012) and gave a 30 minute talk about our work [2,3] yesterday. I decided to get out of my comfort zone and ditched LibreOffice Impress for Beamer –a LaTeX class. I struggled to get around using it, but eventually managed to come up with the slides shown below.


So I went through a series of iterations by playing around with a number of Beamer out-of-the-box themes [4] and finally decided to use a bastardised version of Torino [5]. In addition, I also used the following components and packages.

R for plotting

  • I used R for statistical analysis and plotting
  • Also used Sweave and tikzDevice packages

tikz LaTeX package

  • Input from R used in my workflow requires tikz LaTeX package
  • Additionally, the package facilitates font consistency

Sweave for R integration

  • I use Sweave for integrating resulting TeX plot files

pstricks LaTeX package

  • I used PSTricks for all my block diagrams. Incidentally, I’ve been trying to get my head around using tikZ…
  • I used LaTeXDraw for generating shells for my block diagrams

Asthetics

  • Title cases for slide headers, with the exception of URLs
  • Font sizes used consistently
  • Squares used for bullet points
  • I only went upto three (3) bullet levels

Gotchas

  • pdflatex won’t work with PSTricks and so you need to run latex to generate a dvi file and subsequently run dvipdf to generate final pdf output
  • Plots need to be generated using R Sweave command to generate TeX files

[1] https://github.com/phiri/icadl2012-beamer.git
[2] http://lightonphiri.org/blog/icadl-2012-submission-paper-accepted
[3] http://www.springerlink.com/content/0xw431284p874p34
[4] http://deic.uab.es/~iblanes/beamer_gallery
[5] https://github.com/bbatsov/beamer-torino-theme