A Light Colour Theme for Beamer Poster

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

(Yes it’s been a while. I’ve started working and adapting to the new pace!)

So quite a (long) while ago, I posted my sample beamer poster, while preparing for a conference poster. Now I’ve got another poster to present, and the previous colour schemes just did not go well with the logos. Hence I started tinkering around with the colours, and finally settled on this light, subtle palette:

Blown_Entrepreneur
Color by COLOURlovers.

The sample poster looks like these (shown together with the existing two other colour themes):

And here’s a thumbnail of the actual poster:

Source code of the sample files (including Beamer themes and colours) can be downloaded here.

Extracting Only Cited Bibliography Entries

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

Occasionally, while exchanging files with collaborators or submitting articles, I’d like to extract a smaller .bib file from my main, “hold-all” bibliography file, i.e. containing only the entries that I’d actually cited in my document.

Fortunately this can be done fairly automatically using the bibexport tool. Quick rundown:

  1. Compile your document, say myarticle.tex the usual way, with your “big” allrefs.bib file.
  2. Run bibexport with the following: 
    bibexport -o extracted.bib myarticle

    extracted.bib should now contain only the bibliography entries that were cited in myarticle.tex.

  3. Change \bibliography{allrefs.bib} to \bibliography{extracted.bib} in myarticle.tex.
  4. Send myarticle.tex and extracted.bib to collaborator or editor!

Quick Diagrams with SmartDiagrams

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

It all started with a question on TeX.SX: Namely, is there any quick way to draw diagrams from a list of items, similar to the ‘Smart Art’ feature in PowerPoint 2010?

It wasn’t long before the package smartdiagram was born as a response, using TikZ to do the actual drawings. The basic syntax is:

\usepackage{smartdiagram}
\smartdiagram[diagram type]{list of comma-separated items}

Here are some examples (based on material from here):

\smartdiagram[circular diagram]{Assess,Plan,Implement,Renew}

\smartdiagram[flow diagram]{Assess,Plan,Implement,Renew}
\smartdiagram[buggle diagram]{Planning Cycle,Assess,Plan,Implement,Renew}

If you happen to be preparing a Beamer presentation, replacing the \smartdiagram command with \smartdiagramanimated will result in an automatically ‘animated’ diagram, with each item in the list appearing one at a time as you advance through the slides:

See the manual for other digram types and customisation options (colours, shapes, sizes, etc).

Updates for mmuthesis and umalayathesis

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

Just a quick note that updated classes of mmuthesis and umalayathesis has been uploaded at my website.

mmuthesis

Based on feedback from a MMU student who submitted her thesis recently, IPS now requires that the Publications List be categorised in to Journal Articles and Conference Proceedings, and that text in the appendices should be 10pt. Please read the updated user manual on how to prepare the Publication List under the new scheme.

umalayathesis

Bug fixes of some spacing of appendices entries in the ToC, as well as adjusting the overall line spacing to conform with the expected output by IPS. Font of the cover page now uses Arial Narrow look-alike.