Cornell Beamer Theme

This repository contains a Beamer theme for presentations, styled for talks by Cornell University members.

Repository Contents

• The file beamerthemeCornell.sty defines the Beamer theme; it relies on the title_bg.pdf image for rendering the title page background.

• The file exampletalk.pdf is the result of compiling the exampletalk/exampletalk.tex file, and contains useful information on how to use this theme.

• The directory exampletalk contains a lengthy example of how to use this theme.

• The directory minimal contains a short example of how to use this theme.

Usage

Using this theme is the same as using any other Beamer theme; just \usetheme{Cornell} and start writing.

You should still look at the exampletalk/exampletalk.tex file for details on how to use this theme effectively.

Quick start

Look at the Makefile to see how the examples are built.

More details

The \usetheme{Cornell} directive will cause Beamer to use this theme. For this to work, the beamerthemeCornell.sty file needs to be somewhere that LaTeX can find it. There are several options for this:

1. Copy the beamerthemeCornell.sty file to the same directory as your .tex file.
2. (Linux and mac) Symlink the beamerthemeCornell.sty file to the same directory as your .tex file.
3. Add the directory containing beamerthemeCornell.sty to the TEXINPUTS environment variable. See the SConstruct file for an example of automating this in your build system.

The title_bg.pdf is used by the beamerthemeCornell.sty file and should be copied or symlinked along with it.

Symlinking the files

This is an alternative that allows for more flexibility. If you have an existing git repository, it's easy to include the .sty file in your presentation in a subdirectory. Add this repository as a subdirectory of your presentation directory with the command git submodule add <address-to-this-repository>. This gives you the ability to make commits based on which version of the Beamer template you wish to use.

Once this is done, the final step is to Symlink to files in the subdirectory. In Linux, this can be done with ln -s <subdirectory>/beamerthemeCornell.sty ./beamerthemeCornell.sty (and similarly for title_bg.pdf).

Adding the theme as a submodule is better because it gives full control to the user to specify which version is used in the presentation. If the Beamer theme is updated, older presentations will not be affected unless you want it to.

Examples

The directory exampletalk contains a full example of how to use the various features available. This is a good starting place for any slides based on this theme.

The directory minimal contains a very minimal example of a presentation using this style.

Building the examples: using Make

Run make in the current directory to populate the build directory with the examples.

Building the examples: SCons

Run scons in the current directory to populate the build directory with the examples.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to James Mario Davis with starting the project, and all of Cornell ORIE for feedback.