Acme Beamer Template

One of my few goals this break between classes was to work on some research adjacent projects. The projects that are vaguely related to my research, but don't actually progress it. One of these off shoot project was taking my [slides] from my thesis proposal and rewriting them in beamer. More specifically, writing a beamer theme so that I can use this set up for the rest of my presentations for my senior thesis.

The theme is based on acme, the text editing environment for Plan 9. There are the top two "navigations bars" that are used to create columns and such. When I used acme, I tend to have a large area used for the file(s) I'm currently editing then a "sidebar" with a directory of files I'm using, commands I want to execute, or man pages I want to have open to reference. I tried to mimic this set up in my beamer slides. I treated each section in the LaTeX file as a directory and each subsection as a file in the directory. Then, for any "blocks" like theorems and proofs, I modelled them off of rio, the window manager for Plan 9, and rc, the shell. That styling is a lot more subtle compared to the overall theme. There, it's just a white block with a cyan outline. I'd like to add a "scroll bar", to accentuate the design choice, but it's a bit more of a struggle than I was expecting. I need to play with the tikz package more.

Beamer is an absolute beast. This project has taken many more days and hours than I was expecting. Looking back, it's a good thing that I didn't try to do this before my proposal or I probably wouldn't have finished on time. The theme is almost perfect, I have a few issues I'm still working with.

First, I'd like to have subsubsection navigation. The table of contents isn't as attractive or consistent as I was hoping. I've been working on reading beamer documentation and source code and trying to implement the \insertsubsubsectionnavigation function myself. I'm getting somewhere. I won't say I'm close to being done until I'm done. Everyday beamer brings a new challenge.

Second, there appears to be a bug with allowframebreaks. It's either a newly found existing bug, or I created it when noodling with my theme. This was one of my more recent finds, so I haven't looked at it in depth enough to find it's source. There have been other bugs with allowframebreaks, but nothing related to the one I have at hand.

Third and fourth, I've decided to name "design choices". I had originally wanted to take (sub(sub))section names and "fileize" them. (Sub)Sections with (sub)subsections would appear as "directories" in navigation. I also wanted to remove spaces from the "file names" and make them lowercase. I prefer to keep my file names lowercase as often as possible. I also wanted to prioritize the content in the slide by using lowercase to draw less attention to the navigation on the side. As for spaces, there should never be spaces in file names. After hours of fighting beamer, I've decided it's up to the user to know how to name their navigation "files", whether or not I agree with it. Then the other "design choice" I'm making for the time being is the aforementioned rio scroll bar omission. It's taking too much time to implement for something I don't know if I'd like when it's done.

I have the template posted on GitHub. I'll see how much time I have before classes get the above "bugs" fixed,

[Thesis Proposal Slides in Google Slides]

[Thesis Proposal Slides in Beamer]

An image of the acme editor From Wikipedia under the LPL

A slide from the presentation done in Google Slides

The same slide redone with the beamer template