Re: [O] [PATCH] Adding a BEAMER_HEADER_EXTRA tag, allows short titles, etc.

[Matthew Gidden]

HI Nic,

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 6:19 PM, Nicolas Goaziou <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello,

Matthew Gidden <address@hidden> writes:

> I ran into the issue that many others have cited: an inability to add short
> titles, etc. to org-mode-generated Beamer presentations [1, 2, 3]. This
> patch allows such capability through a BEAMER_HEADER_EXTRA tag, which is
> placed after title, author, etc., but before `\begin{document}`.  Short
> titles, for example, can now be added via
>
> ```
> #+BEAMER_HEADER_EXTRA: \title[A Short Title]{ \inserttitle }
> ```

Thanks for the patch.

BEAMER_HEADER_EXTRA is not a good name, as LATEX_HEADER_EXTRA means
something entirely different. If it's just about short titles, we could
add a BEAMER_SHORT_TITLE keyword.

However what is in the "etc." above?

In many outerthemes (i.e., the beamer header and footer formatting), the "short" version of title, author, institution, and date are used. While this is the (my) primary use case I can think of, the positioning <something other than>BEAMER_HEADER_EXTRA serves as final preamble injection point. I just reread your discussion with Sebastien [1] and agree the proposed name is bad. 

From what I can tell, the current ox-beamer.el does not support beamer's institution macor or the short version of title, author, institution or date. I can think of two options to get around this: 

• do not use #+Title, etc., and simply use BEAMER_HEADER or similar 
• use #+Title plus something like this patch to inject fixes *after* \title  

As a user, I prefer the latter, because it maximizes the portability of my code (so I can use something like org-reveal [2]).

Another option would be to simply move BEAMER_HEADER to inject code where I have implemented BEAMER_HEADER_EXTRA. That would provide the same functionality with a reasonable name. I still need to better format my commit message (I forgot to before submitting), so I can make any other updates that are deemed necessary.

Let me know what you (and others) think.

Cheers,

Matt

[1] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/78582

[2] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/non-beamer-presentations.html#sec-6

Regards,

--
Nicolas Goaziou

--

Matthew Gidden
Ph.D. Candidate, Nuclear Engineering

The University of Wisconsin -- Madison
Ph. 225.892.3192