Category: How-tos

This posts documents an easy to miss feature supported by several LaTeX IDEs, TeXstudio in my case. They allow to cut short some otherwise tedious steps when switching between documents, by embedding a part of this variability into comments within the source files. This increases the portability of a document between TeX installations, increasing the chance that a simple Open and Compile of the source document succeeds on the first try, without first having to read the error log…

I recently switched on tikzexternalize on a document with several figures created by TikZ in it. Activating this Tikz library has the advantage of compiling the figures only once (if unchanged), speeding up the creation of the completed document. As a nice side benefit, one gets the images as separate PDF files, which in my case was the main motivation. One simple call to ImageMagick later, one has all images in a format of choice. However, I could not get it to work at first due to my using the PGFgantt package to create a gantt time chart. Here is the (not compiling) start point: Continue reading “How to use TikZ externalize with PGFgantt”

After my two (!) previous posts on the same topic, it’s time to give my final entry for the competition of the definitive full-frame graphics command for use with beamer in LaTeX. To seal the deal, I do not propose 1, but 4 commands, depending on your use case: Continue reading “Finally the definitive full-frame graphic commands for beamer in LaTeX”

Package hyperref is quite handy for making a compiled LaTeX document more accessible, by allowing to quickly jump to references (back to the text with package backref), section headings (from the table of contents) and weblinks.

By default, links are marked by a coloured rectangles, which only appear on screen, not in print. If one wants to get rid of the rectangles, there are options. However, there is also the colorlinks that marks hyperlinks by changing their text colour. However, these makes all link types become coloured. There is a way to reset certain link types to the default text colour, just by setting their colour to an empty value like this:

\hypersetup{colorlinks=true,linkcolor=,urlcolor=blue}

The trick is the empty value for linkcolor. It applies to internal links (e.g. entries in the table of contents listing), which are thus not touched. This trick can be extended to the other fields citecolor, anchorcolor if needed, to either not change or change their colour.

2018-06-02: This content has been superseded by this newer post: Finally the definitive full-frame graphic commands for beamer in LaTeX. Look there for an updated version.

After my previous post on the same topic, I have improved upon the command considerably. This time, it is based on Matthew Leingang’s answer on the question Image on full slide in beamer package.

Usage:

\fullframegraphic[optional credits]{path/to/image}

To use, copy this definition in your preamble. Requires package tikz.

\newcommand{\fullframegraphic}[2][]{%
\begin{frame}%
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]%
\node[at=(current page.center)] {%
\includegraphics[height=\paperheight,width=\paperwidth,keepaspectratio]{#2}%
};%
% optional argument: credits on lower-right corner
\ifx\relax#1\relax\else%
\node[at=(current page.south east), anchor=south east,font=\tiny,text=white,fill=black,fill opacity=.5,text opacity=1,inner sep=2pt,text height=1ex,text depth=.25ex] {#1};%
\fi%
\end{tikzpicture}%
\end{frame}}

Visual example (for the credits overlay):

Source: File:DA_Cambridge_c1937.jpg on Wikimedia Commons