Alternative Title: The tragic story of how I got trapped making slides with latex.

Typically after giving a presentation at least one person will approach me and ask if they could have access to my custom latex template to make slides with beamer that don’t look rubbish.

TL;DR Yes you can: https://github.com/npqst/latex-beamer-template

What you don’t get to see in the repository is the number of late night hours I have spent tweaking and refining and swearing at these slides trying to inch an image up by three pixels or trying to put two things next to each other while also aligning them. Someone once asked me provide this template and then requested changes. ON A SUNDAY.

Do I wish I had never started making slides in latex? Absolutely.

Am I now stuck with this because I almost always want to recycle introductory slides when I prepare a new talk? Also yes.

So this is what a few odd years of refinement have amounted to:

• A logo header
• A title page that doesn’t scream beamer with those bizarre title boxes.
• A colour adjustable footer bar with navigation that you can adjust according to the colour scheme of your current institution. Fun fact: I’ve only ever needed to make this different shades of blue. I am waiting for the day I need to adjust this template with something rogue. Like red.
• A template for tables that have that cool machine learning format so you can compare nearly identical values and highlight an incremental improvement in bold.
• References. Surprisingly annoying to add to beamer.
• Wide and narrow slides. This was actually refreshingly easy.
• Minipage templates so you can put things next to each other. Because things that are normally easy don’t have to be easy.
• Fun transistions. Nothing quite as sophisticated as PowerPoint 2003 but you can add one bullet point at a time. I know. Revolutionary.
• Enumerated bullet points

For fun I have added screenshots of the template’s progression through the ages. Isn’t it jarring to review talks you gave years ago?