Page Layout ⇒ making a slide transparent and superimposing content

[dpeterson3]

I'm new here. I'm working on my first conference presentation using beamer. I've created a custom template for my lab to match the template my advisor created in powerpoint. I still have one problem with it, though. In his presentations (I'm following his style), he will take a slide and superimpose new content on it while greying out everything else. The only way I've found to mimic this in beamer is http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/ ... next-slide
which works very well, except the node also greys out my frame title, which I would like to remain full strength. Oddly enough, the footline is not covered, and I'm not really sure why.
1) Is there a better way to accomplish what I want to do than what I've done?
2) If not, how to I convince tikz to leave the title uncovered? I do have a variable in my template that measures how tall the title is, and I thought of using that to make an offset for the white box, but it appears to be set to 0 when I try to reference it in a slide. Why is this? (I don't know how beamer gets compiled)

Thanks in advance.

[Johannes_B]

Hi and welcome.

I am not a tikz expert i have to say.
You mention a template you have that measures the height of the title. Having this seems to be important for a solution. Can you post a working example, that gives us code we can take and test immediately?

My personal opinion: Keep the presentation as simple and clean as possible. If you want the listeners to have a great and magical time, get them tickets to a magic show.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Welcome to the forum!

Also I would test your code in order to find a possible solution, if you would like to post it. A small compilable example as start for working would be great! You could replace text and logo of course. A lion or a duck photo or drawing would be great as logo. You know, having fun makes working and supporting LaTeX in a forum fun.

The advice of Johannes is also good, regarding keeping special effects to a minimum. Fine designed legible presentation is great, effects might be a bit distracting. I guess they are not mandatory if the template is matched regarding the layout. The magic show word was with a smile of course.

Well, programming an effect is fun too for it's own sake. So I would say it's easy to achieve that: just put a TikZ node into the slide foreground layer, which covers the whole page, with opacity<1 and possible shading/fading. And the title should be in the foreground layer. Well, sounds like we need a background layer for the text, middle layer for the overlay and foreground for the title. But two layers could suffice with normal beamer slide overlay. Perhaps I could built it into your sample code.

Stefan

[dpeterson3]

Sorry it took me a while to reply. I had to modify my template to remove the shcool name and everything. I've attached my template files and a 3 slide test presentation I use. Right now, the superimpose function I'm using is defined in the top of the presentation. Once I have it working well, I plan to move it into the template instead so I don't have to remember to put it in every time. I'm on linux (part of the reason I'm trying to aviod powerpoint on this), using latexmk to build my code. I don't think that makes a difference, but I figured I should include it just in case. Thanks for looking at this.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Quick thought, I just applied an yshift and changed \filldraw to \fill:

Code: Select all

\newcommand<>{\superimpose}[2][]{%
    \tikz[overlay, remember picture]{%
        \fill#3[fill=white, opacity=0.8] ([yshift=-1.3cm]current page.north west) rectangle (current page.south east);
        %\filldraw#3[fill=white, opacity=0.8] (accent_left.south east) rectangle (current page.south east);
        \node#3[at=(current page.center), line width=0.3mm, rounded corners=20pt, drop shadow, #1]
			{\vspace{35pt} #2 \vspace{35pt}};
    }%
}

Because of the shift the title remains intact. And I omitted the drawing of the rectangle border.

Stefan

[dpeterson3]

Thanks for the reply. I actually came up with a working solution right after I posted.

Code: Select all

\newcommand<>{\superimpose}[2][]{%
    \tikz[overlay, remember picture]{%
        \filldraw#3[fill=white, opacity=0.8, draw=none] (accent_left.south west) rectangle (current page.south east);
        \node#3[at=(current page.center), line width=0.3mm, rounded corners=20pt, drop shadow, #1]
			{\vspace{35pt} #2 \vspace{35pt}};
    }%
}

The accent_left is the node that makes the red side bar in the title, and its height is determined by the title height. I just added the remember picture option to the template, and that seems to take care of the problem.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Great that it works for you.

With TikZ you can make anything.

Stefan