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I'm working on a customized template for LaTeX beamer. It's finished, except for some strange behaviour of textpost on the title page. Sample code:

\documentclass[t]{beamer}
\usepackage[absolute,overlay]{textpos}

\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}

\addtobeamertemplate{footline}{}{
\begin{textblock*}{100mm}(.5cm,.96\textheight)
This text should not appear on the title sheet.
\end{textblock*}}

\begin{document}

\title{Some title}

\begin{frame}
\titlepage
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
\frametitle{Some frame title}
Some text
\end{frame}

\end{document}

The result looks like this:

enter image description here

It looks like the title page has two footers! But I don't want any headers or footers on my title page. I stumbled upon the option [plain], i.e. \begin{frame}[plain]

This results in:

enter image description here

So even though this gives a better result, there is still one footer left. It has something to do with the textpos package. I really need the options absolute and overlay for some other things in my template, so changing this is not an option. I was thinking about adding this text to the frametitle -- instead of the footline -- using \addtobeamertemplate{frametitle}, but this is not a very clean solution.

Any ideas how to fix this? Since I'm creating the title page from scratch, is there an option to clear the entire title page? Or anything like \pagestyle{empty}?

[Edit] Or any way to add a logo in the bottom right corner and some text in the bottom left corner without using textpos is welcome! But keep in mind that it shouldn't be exactly in the corners, there must be some whitespace around it.

Ailurus
  • 1,163
  • I don't understand your issue. Why are you adding texpos textblocks within the footer? If you want some free floating text block in some position on the title page, you just put \begin{textblock*} inside the frame. – Mobius Pizza Mar 21 '12 at 15:58
  • No, it's the other way around. In my template there are two blocks in the footer: the name of my department (text) and a logo (PDF). Since I want full control of their position, I decided to use the textpos package. These two blocks should NOT appear in the title page. – Ailurus Mar 21 '12 at 16:11
  • While I find a more elegant solution, you can move the \addtobeamertemplate code after the frame containing the title and this will solve the problem. – Gonzalo Medina Mar 21 '12 at 20:51
  • Well a very inelegant solution is just to put a white rectangular tikzpicture overlay to hide the text/logo :P

    Have you checked out link?

     – Mobius Pizza Mar 21 '12 at 22:40
  • Thanks guys for the suggestions. Are there perhaps other ways to control the position of objects in the footer? – Ailurus Mar 21 '12 at 22:54
  • @Ailurus: perhaps if you tell us what exactly should go in the footline (you already mentioned some text and a logo, but in what positions? do you need some color background for the footline?), we could suggest you some alternatives not involving textpos. So, please give us a full description of the desired look for the footline. – Gonzalo Medina Mar 22 '12 at 02:19
  • @GonzaloMedina: in the bottom right corner, there should be a logo (but with some whitespace between the logo and the edge). In the bottom left corner, there should be a text (and again, some whitespace between the text and the edge). Perhaps I could use \logo? – Ailurus Mar 22 '12 at 09:01

1 Answers1

3

You don't really need the textpos package to design your footline; you can use a beamercolorbox having a width equal to \paperwidth; the options leftskip and rightskip let you specify the left and right skips, respectively, and the sep option allows you to introduce some extra space around the contents.

Here's a little example (the command \FootlineText will contain the text that should appear to the left of the footline):

\PassOptionsToPackage{demo}{graphicx}
\documentclass{beamer}

\newcommand\FootlineText{The text that goes in the footline}

\setbeamertemplate{footline}{%
  \begin{beamercolorbox}[sep=1em,wd=\paperwidth,leftskip=0.5cm,rightskip=0.5cm]{}
    \FootlineText
    \hfill
    \includegraphics[height=10pt]{logo}
  \end{beamercolorbox}%
}

\author{Some Author}
\title{Some Title}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}[plain]
\maketitle
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
test
\end{frame}

\end{document}

enter image description here

The first line (\PassOptionsToPackage) was used only to make the example compilable for everyone by replacing the actual images with black rectangles; do not use that line in your actual code. Of course, feel free to adapt my example according to your needs.

Gonzalo Medina
  • 505,128
  • Very nice, thanks! It's almost perfect, only the vertical position of the logo should be changed (lowered) a bit (without changing the position of the text). What's the best way to do that? – Ailurus Mar 22 '12 at 13:23
  • @Ailurus: you can include the logo using something like \raisebox{-1ex}{\includegraphics[height=10pt]{logo}} with a convenient length instead of 1ex – Gonzalo Medina Mar 22 '12 at 13:31
  • that's also what I thought. But it moves the text upwards (I think because the image is on the same line as the text). So should I make two boxes, or do something different? – Ailurus Mar 22 '12 at 16:22
  • Of course, using this \raisebox I can move the text upwards (by applying it to the image :D), and then move down the \beamercolorbox. It works, but is this the way I should use it? – Ailurus Mar 22 '12 at 16:32
  • @Ailurus: well, there are some other ways, you could use a \parbox for the text and another one for the logo and then move vertically the logo inside its \parbox (the second optional argument of \parbox lets you explicitly set the height of the box); in this way, the shifting of the logo won't affect the text. – Gonzalo Medina Mar 22 '12 at 17:38