NSF NCAR / UCAR Beamer Template

Branded slides for NSF NCAR, UCAR and UCP, written in LaTeX beamer or Quarto Markdown: a PDF, and from the same Markdown an HTML (revealjs) deck to present in a browser. The theme follows the 2026 Brand Guide: the brand palette, Poppins type, the official logo lockups, and the wave super-graphic.

Click Use this template → Create a new repository at the top of this page. Or, from the command line:

gh repo create my-talk --template benkirk/NCAR_beamer_template --private --clone
cd my-talk

On NCAR systems, module load texlive provides TeX. No font installation is needed, because Poppins is bundled with the theme.

Both starter decks contain a title slide, a section divider, a content slide, a photo slide, code, and a closing slide. Replace the placeholder text, drop your photos into images/, and rebuild.

Stuck? examples/ shows every feature: template.tex, quarto-demo.qmd, and paper.tex for non-slide documents. Build them with make examples.

No TeX to install: open the LaTeX starter deck as a new Overleaf project, with the compiler already set to XeLaTeX:

Open in Overleaf

Or by hand: download ncar-beamer-overleaf.zip from the latest release, New Project → Upload Project, then Settings → Compiler → XeLaTeX (under pdfLaTeX the deck still builds, but in Helvetica with Computer Modern math: the theme's pdfLaTeX fallback) and Recompile.

The project is talk.tex, its photos, the theme in _extensions/ncar/, and a latexmkrc at the root that points TeX at the theme (Overleaf reads it; it is the only way to set TEXINPUTS there). Poppins comes bundled, so it works on the free plan's compile time limit. Quarto decks stay local: Overleaf has no Quarto.

A Quarto project: add the extension to it, then use format: ncar-beamer (PDF) or format: ncar-revealjs (HTML), or list both:

quarto add benkirk/NCAR_beamer_template

An existing LaTeX deck: point TeX at the theme directory and switch the theme:

export TEXINPUTS=/path/to/NCAR_beamer_template/_extensions/ncar//:
export TTFONTS=/path/to/NCAR_beamer_template/_extensions/ncar//:   # bundled Poppins
latexmk -xelatex my-talk.tex

\usetheme[brand=ncar]{NCAR}

An existing Overleaf project: upload the _extensions/ncar folder from the release zip (the .sty files, ncar-assets/fonts/, ncar-assets/logos/) and the zip's latexmkrc at the project root, then \usetheme[...]{NCAR} and set the compiler to XeLaTeX.

Everything in the Quarto column works in both ncar-beamer and ncar-revealjs. The HTML format adds a few things of its own (next section).

Slide footnotes. A paragraph that starts with † (or ‡) is an aside, not body text. Every one on a content slide (not a feature or closing slide), including one inside a column, moves to the slide's foot in the order written. There they stack under one short rule, in small muted type, with the marker hanging in the accent color. In HTML the autofit keeps the body above them; in the PDF two filll springs keep the body centered above and stand the footnotes on the floor. (pptx output can't move content, so a post-render step only mutes them in place; see quarto-docs-framework's style_footnotes.py.)

Layout of a short slide. Six per-slide controls, each independent, act on the body: everything but the title, speaker notes and footnotes.

## Who's still on legacy {.center scale="1.4"}
## A short script {.hcenter .fill}

Images keep their own sizes. Highlighted code keeps its full-width shading in the PDF, so .hcenter shows there only on plain code blocks.

A full-slide figure. {.full} gives one figure the whole slide: a diagram too detailed for the space under a title. The body is a mermaid or {dot} cell, or an image, then optionally a paragraph, which becomes one muted caption line under it (more paragraphs stack). The title, logo, rule and waves are not drawn; the frame number stays. The title stays in the HTML page, hidden, so navigation and tools still find the slide. The figure is scaled to fit, keeping its shape, so a diagram near 16:9 uses the most of it. A body that is anything else (a list, a second figure) draws as an ordinary slide, with a warning.

## Pipeline, end to end {.full}

![](images/pipeline.png)

From commit to production in one picture.

Symbols Poppins lacks. Poppins has no warning sign or arrows. Under XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX the PDF borrows ⚠ and → ← ↔ ⇒ from TeX Live's DejaVu Sans (bold in a bold title), so ## ⚠︎ Check this first needs no raw LaTeX. The invisible U+FE0E written after that ⚠ keeps browsers from drawing an emoji; the PDF prints nothing for it. Other missing characters still drop out, with a warning in the log.

The same Markdown renders as a revealjs web deck, in the same layouts: the title slide with waves or a photo, section dividers, content slides with the accent tab and logo, feature and closing slides.

quarto render talk-quarto.qmd --to ncar-revealjs    # or: make html

Open talk-quarto.html in a browser; keep talk-quarto_files/ beside it.

HTML-only extras:

• ## Title {.brand-dark}: a content slide on Space with white text. PDF draws an ordinary slide.
• Autofit: a content slide that overflows shrinks its body text (down to 65%) until it fits; the title keeps its size. Opt out per slide with {.no-autofit} or {.scrollable}, or per deck with themeoptions: [autofit=false].
• Live diagrams: mermaid and Graphviz draw in the browser, filling the column (capped to the content height). Mermaid picks up the brand font and colors. examples/quarto-demo.qmd has one of each.
• Screenshots: {height="72%" fig-align="center"}, the beamer recipe for a full-width 16:9 image, fits the HTML slide too. A smaller percentage gives a proportionally smaller image.
• Fragments: ::: {.incremental} lists and . . . pauses step through. (Beamer PDF gets one page per step.)

One file to email: set embed-resources: true for a single self-contained .html (fonts, logos and photos inlined). The whiteboard can't be embedded, so turn it off at the same time:

format:
  ncar-revealjs:
    embed-resources: true
    chalkboard: false

A PDF from the HTML deck: open it with ?print-pdf after the file name (for example talk-quarto.html?print-pdf) in Chrome, and print to PDF with background graphics on. For a PDF to hand out, the beamer format is usually the better choice.

The HTML format reads brand, title, waves and autofit and ignores the rest. It has no NSF NCAR-UCAR web lockup yet, so brand=ncarucar shows the NSF NCAR logo there.

make variants builds examples/template.tex in UCAR, NCAR-UCAR, light-title, 4:3, pdfLaTeX and mathfont=poppins flavors.

Poppins has no math. Left to itself, beamer sets the letters of an equation in Poppins Italic among Computer Modern symbols, which is fine for a variable name in a sentence and falls apart on anything with fractions or operators. So the theme sets a serif math font, scaled a little to sit with Poppins' large x-height, and mathfont= picks which:

Under pdfLaTeX serif gives Computer Modern math and the other presets fall back to it. The fonts come with TeX Live (newcomputermodern, stix2-otf, tex-gyre-math, lete-sans-math, firamath; Debian and Ubuntu ship Pagella Math in fonts-texgyre-math, not in texlive-fonts-extra); a preset whose font is missing warns and keeps the document's math font.

In Quarto, themeoptions: [mathfont=stix] does the same, and Quarto's own mathfont: key still works (the theme then leaves math alone). The HTML deck is unaffected: MathJax sets its own serif math.

\ncarmathfont{<preset>} selects a preset later in the preamble, and \ncarmathversion{<version>}{<preset>} sets one up as a math version to compare several in one document; examples/mathfonts.tex is the specimen above.

Use the palette by name:

• NSF NCAR: NCARBlue, DarkBlue, Space, LightBlue, LightGray
• UCAR/UCP: UCARAqua, UCARAquaContrast, LightAqua
• Accents: BrandOrange, BrandYellow

There are also brand-aware roles that follow the brand= option: BrandPrimary, BrandPrimaryText, BrandSecondary, BrandAccent and BrandText.

• Text colors:
  • Dark Blue on white or Light Gray.
  • White on NCAR Blue.
  • Space on UCAR Aqua.
• Accents: orange and yellow appear only in small amounts (the title bar, the slide-title tab, alert blocks).
• Logos:
  • The NCAR logo is always locked up with the NSF logo.
  • Full-color on light backgrounds, white-reversed on dark ones.
  • Never placed on busy photos, so feature slides have no logo.
• Fonts: Poppins Bold for headlines and Poppins Regular for body text, with Helvetica as the substitute.
• Waves: the three lines of the brand's cover art, traced from the slide template (tools/fit-waves.py): the photo title and the content-slide lines as on the template, the same curves shifted right on dividers and the closing slide. Never more than three, never crossing, never in an accent color.

The logos are the official RGB lockups from the UCAR brand portal (https://ucar.canto.com/v/branding). NSF NCAR, UCAR and UCP staff may use them on presentations without further permission. For any other use, contact designhelp@ucar.edu. Poppins is distributed under the SIL Open Font License.

talk.tex, talk-quarto.qmd   your starter decks
latexmkrc                   points latexmk at the theme (Overleaf reads it)
images/                     photos (examples use images/wallpaper/)
_extensions/ncar/           the theme: Quarto extension *and* LaTeX sources
  beamerthemeNCAR.sty         options; loads the color/font/inner/outer themes
  ncar_branding.sty           palette, fonts, logos, listings style (also for non-beamer docs)
  ncar-beamer.lua             Quarto: loads the theme; Markdown sugar
  ncar-revealjs.{scss,css,js,lua}, title-slide.html
                              the HTML (revealjs) format
  ncar.theme                  syntax-highlighting colors
  ncar-assets/                logos and bundled Poppins; web/ holds the HTML logos
tools/web-logos.sh          regenerates ncar-assets/web/ from the brand kit
tools/fit-waves.py          fits the wave curves to the brand's cover art
examples/                   feature showcase (LaTeX, Quarto, article), math font specimen
  diagrams/                   one Graphviz and one mermaid source, shared by both
                              showcases; `make diagrams` rebuilds the PDFs that
                              template.tex includes (needs Graphviz and npx)

Releasing: bump version in _extensions/ncar/_extension.yml (and VERSION in ncar-revealjs.lua), merge, then tag it: git tag v2.3.1 && git push origin v2.3.1. The release workflow builds make overleaf's zip and publishes a GitHub Release with it, which is what the Overleaf link above opens; it refuses a tag that does not match the extension version. Quarto users can pin one: quarto add benkirk/NCAR_beamer_template@v2.3.1.

1. Change \usetheme{ncar} to \usetheme{NCAR}.
2. Point TEXINPUTS and TTFONTS at this repo's _extensions/ncar/ (see "Already have a project?" above).

Everything else carries over:

• Environments:
  • NCARtitleframe[img] becomes the new title slide. Its body, usually \vspace plus \maketitle, is ignored.
  • NCARprettyframe[img] becomes a photo feature frame, or a brand-field frame when no image is given.
• Colors: the old names still compile. HilightGreen is now an NCAR Blue text highlight, so it stays legible on white.
• \logo{...} still decorates the bottom of a slide, as before.
• listings is still loaded automatically, and your own \lstset still works.
• No-op commands: \titlebackground, \nobackground and \defaultbackground do nothing.

What looks different:

• Poppins is wider than Helvetica, so slides packed to the limit may need trimming or [shrink].
• Each \section now gets a divider slide. Use sectionpages=false for the old behavior.
• footer=full shows the section name in the footer, as the old footer did.
• Math is set in a serif math font (since 2.3; mathfont=poppins restores Poppins letters), and content slides carry the brand's faint wave lines (waves=false removes them).

The previous theme (\usetheme{ncar}, CoolGray with the older #1A658F blue and Cormorant) is preserved at tag v1.0-brand2020 and on branch brand-2020. Documents that use its color names (NCARBlue, CoolGray11, DeepBlue, ...) still compile with this version; those names map onto the nearest 2026 colors.

Copyright © 2026 University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

This theme is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International); the full text is in LICENSE. You may share and adapt it with attribution, provided you distribute your changes under the same license.

Slides you create with the template are your own content. The license covers the theme and the starter files, not what you put in your deck.

These parts are not covered by that license:

• NSF, NCAR, UCAR and UCP logos (_extensions/ncar/ncar-assets/logos/ and ncar-assets/web/). These are trademarks used under the UCAR brand guidelines.
• The Poppins font (_extensions/ncar/ncar-assets/fonts/Poppins/) is licensed under the SIL Open Font License; see OFL.txt in that directory.
• The photographs in images/wallpaper/ are carried over from the original template as example imagery. Replace them with your own.