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How to get rid of those beamer warnings

27 September 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

Many users of the beamer class are irritated by several beamer warnings at every compiler run that are not caused by themselves, I’m referring to the beamer version 3.07. Those warnings are not really important, but it’s a good habit to debug all warnings instead of just ignoring them, otherwise an important warning could easily be overlooked.

When I compile this really small example:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{default}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
Test
\end{frame}
\end{document}

I’m getting 6 warnings, after the second compilation of course less, but these 4 warnings remain:

  1. Package pgf Warning: This package is obsolete and no longer needed on input line 13.
  2. Package hyperref Warning: Option `pdfpagelabels’ is turned off
    (hyperref) because \thepage is undefined.
    Hyperref stopped early
  3. LaTeX Font Warning: Font shape `OT1/cmss/m/n’ in size <4> not available
    (Font) size <5> substituted on input line 6.
  4. LaTeX Font Warning: Size substitutions with differences
    (Font) up to 1.0pt have occurred.

Let’s eliminate those warnings:

  1. beamer.cls is loading the obsolete package pgfbaseimage.sty that does nothing but loads pgfcore and prints out this warning. If you put a file with the same name pgfbaseimage.sty somewhere into your texmf directory (TEXMFHOME for example) or into the directory of your tex document containing just the line \RequirePackage{pgfcore} the warning will disappear.
  2. Set pdfpagelabels to false by yourself, by providing a beamer class option: hyperref={pdfpagelabels=false}
  3. beamerbasefont.sty defines the commands \Tiny and \TINY to choose very small font sizes. Redefine at least \Tiny or load a font providing that size, for instance Latin Modern.
  4. fixed by 3.

The new file:

\documentclass[hyperref={pdfpagelabels=false}]{beamer}
\usepackage{default}
\let\Tiny=\tiny
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
Test
\end{frame}
\end{document}

will not cause warnings any more. Using those workarounds you won’t be annoyed by unnecessary warnings during development of presentations. Though the redefinition of \Tiny will fix it for Computer Modern fonts I recommend to consider to use Latin Modern instead:

\usepackage{lmodern}

Category: Presentations | 6 Comments »

New LaTeX course released

17 July 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

A new beamer class based presentation introducing LaTeX has been released these days. The author Dr. Engelbert Buxbaum created this presentation for a LaTeX course at the Biochemistry faculty at RUSM and released it for use under GNU Copyleft. It’s based on the tex-kurs by Rainer Rupprecht, translated to English using additional info from l2short. The source code is available too. For download see it’s CTAN directory.

Category: Presentations, LaTeX General | No Comments »

Beamer: frame number in split theme footline

12 July 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

Yet again somebody in the mrunix forum asked for an advice how to put the frame number into the footline of his beamer presentation. He was using the “Warsaw” outer theme. The first solution

\setbeamertemplate{footline}[frame number]

will just overwrite the “Warsaw” footline.

Possible solutions are: to use a different outer theme or to change the “Warsaw” footline. “Warsaw” uses the split outher theme, a workaround for insertion of the frame number should consider that and will be usable for other themes like “Copenhagen”, “Luebeck” and “Malmoe”. Inspection of the file beamerouterthemesplit.sty reveals that the footline uses the \insertshorttitle macro in its right part. So a quick workaround could be to redefine that macro:

\newcommand*\oldmacro{}%
\let\oldmacro\insertshorttitle%
\renewcommand*\insertshorttitle{%
  \oldmacro\hfill%
  \insertframenumber\,/\,\inserttotalframenumber}

If you want to see more details you could look at example source code and its pdf output.

This topic was discussed on mrunix.de and in the Matheplanet forum.

Category: Presentations, plain TeX | 1 Comment »