arguelles

Argüelles is a beamer theme that helps you create beautiful presentations. It aims for simplicity and readability by following best practices of graphic design. The layout is elegant but subtle, so as to keep the audience's attention on your content. This is brought to life by Alegreya, one of the 53 Fonts of the Decade selected by the Association Typographique Internationale (2011).

The theme requires the packages tikz, microtype, Alegreya, euler, and fontawesome5 to be installed on your computer. These are included in common LaTeX distributions, such as MiKTeX and TeXLive.

Demo

The files demo.tex and demo.pdf demonstrate the main features of the theme.

Installation

Argüelles is hosted on CTAN and distributed as part of MikTex and TeXLive. It can also be installed manually by cloning this repository in your $HOME/texmf/tex/latex folder, which is automatically searched by LaTeX. If you do not have this folder, you can create one.

Customization

It is possible to change parts of the theme by altering the style files. There are five such files:

• beamercolortheme*.sty sets the colors;
• beamerfonttheme*.sty sets font styles and weights;
• beamerinnertheme*.sty sets the appearance of frames;
• beameroutertheme*.sty sets the appearance of headline and frame titles;
• beamertheme*.sty loads required packages, and defines custom colors and commands.

Colors

Suppose you want to change the color scheme. By default, the background consists of an off-white (cultured) rectangle over an ink-colored (sumi) canvas. The color of alerted text is set to a bright red called corsa. These color definitions are included in beamertheme*.sty.

\definecolor{cultured}{HTML}{f5f5f5}
\definecolor{sumi}{HTML}{27221f}
\definecolor{corsa}{HTML}{d40000}
\definecolor{fern}{HTML}{4f7942}
\definecolor{cobalt}{HTML}{0047ab}

There are also two more colors, fern and cobalt, which are currently unused in the design. If you wanted one of these to be the color of alerted text, then you would open beamercolortheme*.sty and look for:

\setbeamercolor*{alerted text}{fg=corsa}

Change corsa to some other color and you are set. Similar changes can be made to tweak the color of normal text, the background, or any other element of the layout. Of course, you can also define your own colors.

Font weights

It is possible to change font styles and weights. Alegreya is a comprehensive family and comes with a variety of weights, as does its sister family Alegreya Sans. In addition to the usual bold set by \bfseries, Alegreya comes in medium, extra bold, and black. Alegreya Sans further comes in light and thin. These weights are set by commands like \AlegreyaExtraBold or \AlegreyaSansThin (see the Alegreya README for more details), and can be combined with \scshape or \itshape to produce a variety of effects.

The file beamerfonttheme*.sty sets the type for various elements of the layout. For example, the appearance of frame titles is determined by the following command:

\setbeamerfont{frame title}{size=\Large}

If you wanted to give frame titles a little bit more weight, you could write {series=\AlegreyaMedium,size=\Large}. If you wanted to make them slightly larger, you could change \Large to \LARGE.

By default, the theme uses serif type for most text and reserves sans-serif type for the presentation title, formatted in black weight, and URLs. It is possible to alter this behavior by modifying beamerfonttheme*.sty. For example, the appearance of the presentation title is determined by:

\setbeamerfont{title}{series=\AlegreyaSansBlack,size=\LARGE}

Changing \AlegreyaSansBlack to \AlegreyaBlack in this command makes the title serif like any other text. Deleting \usefonttheme{serif} near the top of the style file makes sans-serif type the new default for all text. Changing \urlstyle{sf} to \urlstyle{same} makes URLs appear like normal text, and deleting the line altogether resets them to true type.

Figures

Figures are automatically set to old style, which is more varied and dynamic than the lining ("modern") style. If you wish to use lining figures instead, you can set these as default by opening beamertheme*.sty and removing the osf options from the packages Alegreya and AlegreyaSans.

Both old-style and lining figures are also available in a monospaced version, which is helpful for tables and other environments where numbers are displayed in column. It is possible to use monospaced versions locally with \AlegreyaTOsF (for old style) and \AlegreyaTLF (for lining). They can also be set as global defaults by loading packages with the tf option, as in:

\RequirePackage[osf,tf]{Alegreya}
\RequirePackage[osf,tf]{AlegreyaSans}

Known issues

Argüelles is built with the intention to reserve as much space as possible for the content of your slides. When using subsections, the progress bar in the headline places dots on multiple lines, which takes space away from your content. The theme does not handle this situation well. You can force the dots to appear on the same line by loading beamer with the compress option, as in demo.tex:

\documentclass[compress]{beamer}

If you find any other problem using this package, please open an issue.