Document Classes ⇒ What are the »beamer« elements?

[LuckyDucky]

New Latex Community member here!

I'm making beamer themes for my school and I will be using main themes already available (Berkeley, AnnArbor, etc) and just making color themes.

Where can I find a list of the beamer-colors and what they do? I have downloaded the beamer user guide but it does not list every beamer-color.

For example,

Code: Select all

\setbeamercolor{normal text}{bg=black, fg=white}

will make the slide background black and the text white.

For now, I have been looking at the included color themes and making a list of all the beamer-colors. There are some that I am unsure of what they control, i.e. "item projected".

Also, is it possible to make the background a gradient of 2 colors but with the gradient in any direction I want? The default seems to be up/down only.

Finally, can someone explain to me what the difference is between star commands and non star commands?

[frabjous]

I think your best bet would be to take one of the existing color themes (e.g., beamercolorthemedefault.sty, beamercolorthemewolverine.sty, etc.) and modify them to fit your needs. You'll get a premade list of the elements that way.

You might want to check, e.g., the documentation of the xcolor package for info on defining colors. I think beamer uses the same scheme.

I'm not sure which commands you had in mind but the starred version of \usebeamercolor "resets" the color to that of normal text. With the regular version, if you first set both the background and the foreground color, and then later on, change the background color again, the foreground color will still be what it was after you invoked the command the first time. If you used the starred version the second time, the foreground color will revert to the default. (Or something like that. I don't have a lot of experience.)

Unfortunately, I don't know of a good way to know what they do apart from trial and error, or actually reading through the actual beamer class files (perhaps searching for the terms in question).

[LuckyDucky]

That's what I'm going to do but some of the color themes change the colors of different elements in beamer.

Here is a list of everything I found in the color theme sty files:

http://pastebin.com/nK3BWG5v

As to the * commands, I think you're right. If you don't specify a color (bg, fg), the default will be used if you use a * command but if you use a regular command, the color will be unchanged if unspecified.