WVU Beamer template

The WVU Beamer template is a theme for West Virginia University presentations, built on Maxime Chupin's Amurmaple theme. Slides are written with standard Beamer commands and Amurmaple's additional layouts, and the colors, Helvetica-compatible font, bullets, logos, and background patterns are applied by the theme.

1. Upload the project to Overleaf, or open it in your local LaTeX editor.
2. Select LuaLaTeX as the compiler and main.tex as the main document.
3. Edit the title, author, institute, date, email, webpage, collaboration, and slides in main.tex.
4. Compile. Open guide.tex separately when you want examples to copy.

The starter loads the theme with \usetheme{WVU}. Keep beamerthemeWVU.sty, latexmkrc, and the complete styles/ directory beside your presentation file, along with any figures you use. A local TeX installation also needs Beamer, Amurmaple, the svg package, and their dependencies, available through TeX Live or MiKTeX. Inkscape is needed for the automatic SVG conversion.

The artwork is stored as SVG files in styles/patterns/ and styles/tags/. These files are converted to PDF at compile time, so no PDF copies need to be prepared.

Set the presentation information in your document's preamble:

\documentclass[aspectratio=169,10pt]{beamer}
\usetheme{WVU}

\title[Short title]{Presentation title}
\subtitle{Optional subtitle}
\author[Short name]{Your name}
\institute[WVU]{West Virginia University}
\date{\today}
\mail{you@mail.wvu.edu}
\webpage{https://example.org}
\collaboration{Your collaboration}

The optional short forms in square brackets are used in the sidebar. Put \maketitle immediately after \begin{document} for the title slide, which is drawn without the sidebar navigation and slide number.

Amurmaple's contact commands are set in the starter. \mail prints your email on the title slide and along the right edge of ordinary slides. \webpage adds a website to the title slide, and \collaboration adds a line below the title and subtitle. Replace the sample values with your own. An empty value, such as \mail{}, removes that detail.

Each frame is one slide, and each \section adds an entry to the sidebar navigation. Normal Beamer lists and blocks are used in each frame:

\section{Results}
\begin{frame}{Main result}
  \begin{itemize}
    \item State the finding.
    \item Explain the evidence.
  \end{itemize}
  \begin{block}{Takeaway}
    State what the audience should remember.
  \end{block}
\end{frame}

Use enumerate for numbered lists, columns for side-by-side material, and \includegraphics for figures. alertblock and exampleblock take a required title just like block. Standard mathematical environments such as theorem, definition, and proof are also styled by the theme. Each environment has a fixed accent color, listed in the brand notes, so choose each environment by its meaning in the talk.

Beamer features such as \pause, overlay specifications like \item<2->, \note{...}, \tableofcontents, and navigation buttons work normally. Code listings or verbatim text require \begin{frame}[fragile]{Title}. These features are shown in the guide, and the full syntax is given in the Beamer manual.

The WVU theme keeps the following Amurmaple commands and environments:

\sepframe and \thanksframe create their own slides and are placed between frames. Without a title option, \sepframe uses the current section name. The closing slide reuses the title graphic.

More examples are given in the bundled Amurmaple manual and on CTAN. The WVU theme loads Amurmaple itself and then applies the WVU styling, so only \usetheme{WVU} is needed.

Amurmaple's layout options are also accepted by the WVU theme:

Options are given in the theme line, for example \usetheme[toplogo,sidebarwidth=64pt]{WVU}. By default, the margin email and progress gauge are shown, the logo is at the bottom, and frame titles are on the right.

The pattern and the navigation sidebar are turned off with this theme line:

\usetheme[pattern=none,sidebar=false]{WVU}

The default pattern is Topo - Solid (topo-solid, also accepted as topo), and none gives a plain panel. Both options are shown in the guide. The artwork folder holds topo-blue.svg, topo-gold.svg, and topo-white.svg, and the theme uses the white variant on its blue panels.

The GWAC SVG is the default title and closing graphic. Its size is set in the preamble:

\wvusetup{
  logo-width=6.5cm
}

A different SVG is set with logo=path/to/your-logo.svg, and logo=none removes the title and closing graphic. The standard \titlegraphic{...} command also works for custom content or other image formats. After the pattern is turned off, \wvusetup{pattern=topo-solid} restores it. A change made in a TeX group applies only to that group.

The email, website, and collaboration keys in \wvusetup are aliases for Amurmaple's \mail, \webpage, and \collaboration commands.

The theme also adds WVU commands such as \wvuheading{Heading}, \wvuarrow, \wvulocation{Place}, \wvupoi{Point of interest}, and \wvuqr[2.5cm]{https://example.org}{Paper and slides}. The WVU extras section of the guide shows the patterns, tags, and QR code in context.

On Overleaf, compile main.tex for your talk or select guide.tex as the main document to browse the examples. Both use LuaLaTeX.

From the project directory, build locally with:

latexmk -lualatex -file-line-error -halt-on-error -interaction=nonstopmode main.tex
latexmk -lualatex -file-line-error -halt-on-error -interaction=nonstopmode guide.tex

The outputs are main.pdf and guide.pdf. The logos, tags, and topo patterns are SVG files, which are converted to PDF through Inkscape by the svg package during compilation. The shell escape that this conversion needs is set in latexmkrc. A local build also needs the inkscape command on your PATH.

The converted files in svg-inkscape/ are a build cache and are not edited or distributed. The theme finds its own support files. For the older \usepackage{amurmaplewvu} entry point, latexmkrc also adds styles/ to the TeX search path.

Both documents are built by the Build template workflow in GitHub Actions, and the PDFs are uploaded as the wvu-beamer-example and wvu-beamer-guide artifacts for 14 days. The compiled slides should still be checked by eye for readable text, spacing, and image proportions.

This is a WVU adaptation of Maxime Chupin's Amurmaple theme, with TeX Gyre Heros for portable Helvetica-compatible text. The attribution of the reference example is kept in guide.tex.

The brand references are WVU's visual identity and Design System cheat sheet. The artwork sources and their preparation are described in the artwork notes. The color of each environment and the reasons for it are recorded in the brand notes.

styles/beamercolorthemewvu.sty is the palette source for the DTV papers, PilotProxy, RFIsher, and RadioFisher. Standalone Python or TeX copies are exported with:

python3 tools/export_plot_palette.py --python ../dtv-rs/figsrc/wvu_palette.py
python3 tools/export_plot_palette.py --tex ../dtv-rs/figsrc/wvu_palette.tex

With --check, each copy is compared with a fresh export of the palette source and left unchanged. Several --python and --tex paths can be given in one run. The copies need no Beamer installation, and the Python copy imports its plotting packages only when sequential_cmap() or plot_rcparams() is called.

In the Python copy, measurements are drawn in WVU Blue (MEASURED), and model curves and small labels in Old Gold (MODEL). Bright WVU Gold has too little contrast for small text on white, so it is used for fills and highlights. Further series take the other named WVU colors in the order of SERIES, with markers, line styles, or direct labels as a second cue.

The blue intensity scale from sequential_cmap() has monotonically decreasing lightness and is meant for ordered values. Binary masks stay in grayscale, and a diverging or cyclic quantity is given a diverging or cyclic scale. Journal requirements and scientific readability take priority over the brand colors. Typography, figure dimensions, normalizations, and scientific inputs are set by each figure script and are independent of the palette.