axh beamer templates

A personal Beamer template for talks, tuned for theoretical cryptography. Black / white / gray / dark-purple palette (sampled from axhoover.com) with comforting Palatino-family fonts.

The first template, research, is a conference/seminar talk. The shared visual identity lives in three reusable sub-themes so a future lecture template can drop in with the same look.

Quick start

make            # builds main.pdf
make watch      # rebuild on save (latexmk -pvc)
make clean

Or directly (the theme/ directory must be on TEXINPUTS):

TEXINPUTS=./theme//: latexmk -pdf main.tex

make and latexmkrc set TEXINPUTS for you. The lattice motif uses remember picture, so a clean build runs LaTeX twice (latexmk handles this).

Options

\usetheme{research}              % light, newpx (TeX Gyre Pagella) fonts
\usetheme[dark]{research}        % dark slate theme throughout
\usetheme[mathpazo]{research}    % classic mathpazo instead of newpx

Section slides and the closing slide are always dark slate for contrast, in both light and dark modes.

Layout

main.tex          example talk (copy this to start a new one)
macros.tex        crypto math macros (\input by the talk)
demo.bib          self-contained refs for the example
theme/
  beamercolorthemeaxh.sty     palette + light/dark   (shared)
  beamerfontthemeaxh.sty      newpx / mathpazo fonts (shared)
  beamerinnerthemeaxh.sty     blocks, theorems, bullets, \axhlattice (shared)
  beamerouterthemeresearch.sty  title, frame titles, footline, sections, closing
  beamerthemeresearch.sty     entry point: options -> loads the above
  assets/{me.jpg, icon.png}   from axhoover.com
references/        git submodule (your .bib library)

Writing a talk

Set the metadata, then use ordinary Beamer commands:

\title[Short]{Full Title}
\subtitle{...}
\author[A. Hoover]{Alex Hoover}
\institute{Stevens Institute of Technology}
\date{...}
\email{ahoover@stevens.edu}     % shown on the closing slide
\homepage{axhoover.com}         % shown on the closing slide

Theme-specific helpers:

• \thanksframe[Questions?] — dark closing slide with the icon mark + contacts. Override the image with \closingmark{me.jpg} (the headshot is still bundled).
• \section{...} — emits a dark, oblique-lattice section divider automatically.
• \axhlattice — drop the lattice motif onto any frame's background.

Block types (each visually distinct)

The type is encoded by hue + style, so the audience can tell them apart at a glance:

Environment(s)	Look
theorem lemma proposition corollary	purple bar, purple tint
claim	purple bar, no tint (lighter weight)
conjecture	purple dashed bar (speculative)
definition	slate bar + tint
remark	gray bar, italic body
block{...} exampleblock{...}	gray / slate container, your title
alertblock{...}	sage callout (the secondary accent)
proof	unboxed, italic lead-in + q.e.d. □

The statement environments are auto-numbered (shared counter) and take an optional parenthetical name: \begin{theorem}[Pythagoras] ... \end{theorem}. They're built on tcolorbox, so avoid \pause/overlays inside a box (put the overlay on the surrounding \item/frame instead).

Figure palette

The palette is purple + a sage second accent (#5E8C6A) + grays. For plots and TikZ diagrams, named colors are provided that stay distinct in both color and (roughly) grayscale: axhseriesA (purple), axhseriesB (sage), axhseriesC (slate), axhseriesD (gray). The accent itself is axhsage; purple is axhpurple.

\draw[axhseriesA, thick] ... ;   \draw[axhseriesB, thick] ... ;

Using your real bibliography

The example cites demo.bib so it builds standalone. For real talks, use the references submodule:

git submodule update --init --recursive   # pulls references/ (+ cryptobib)

\bibliography{references/others,references/cryptobib/crypto}

The full reference list lives after \thanksframe (Questions?), inside \appendix, so during the talk the inline [CGKS98]-style citations carry the load and the full list is there for anyone reading the deck afterward:

\thanksframe[Questions?]
\appendix
\begin{frame}[allowframebreaks]{References}
  \scriptsize
  \bibliographystyle{alpha}
  \bibliography{demo}
\end{frame}

\appendix also stops the footer's frame counter, so the talk reads "n / 11" and the reference slides number independently. allowframebreaks splits a long list across as many slides as needed.

Adding the lecture template later

Add theme/beamerouterthemelecture.sty (its own title/section layout) and theme/beamerthemelecture.sty (which calls \usecolortheme{axh}, \usefonttheme{axh}, \useinnertheme{axh}, \useoutertheme{lecture}). The three shared axh files stay untouched, so both templates look like one family.