22  The structure font and font themes

Beamer’s structure font determines the font for rendering a presentation’s structural elements such as headers and footers and some titlepage entries.

The default structure font for most themes is a medium-weight, upright, sans-serif font. Here is the theme umbc2 rendered with Beamer’s default structure font:

\documentclass[14pt]{beamer} 
\usetheme{umbc2} 

Let’s change the structure font to italics. Note the changes in the titlepage and headers and footers of the slides.

\documentclass[14pt]{beamer} 
\setbeamerfont{structure}{family=\rmfamily,shape=\itshape} 
\usetheme{umbc2} 

Here are a few more examples.

Slanted structure font:

\documentclass[14pt]{beamer} 
\setbeamerfont{structure}{shape=\itshape} 
\usetheme{umbc2} 

Bold structure font:

\documentclass[14pt]{beamer} 
\setbeamerfont{structure}{series=\bfseries} 
\usetheme{umbc2} 

Bold and italic structure font:

\documentclass[14pt]{beamer} 
\setbeamerfont{structure}{family=\rmfamily,series=\bfseries,shape=\itshape} 
\usetheme{umbc2} 

Font themes

Beamer offers a predefined set of font options which affect not only the structural elements, but also the normal text and mathematics. I will give only a few illustrations here. For a complete description of Beamer font themes you should read Beamer’s documentation.

The font theme serif changes all document fonts to serif. This includes structure elements as well as normal text and (most of) mathematics.

\documentclass[14pt]{beamer} 
\usefonttheme{serif} 
\usetheme{umbc2} 

As you see, \sin and \cos are still set in sans-serif. This appears to be a Beamer bug.

The option stillsansseriftext exempts the normal text from changing to serif:

\documentclass[14pt]{beamer} 
\usefonttheme[stillsansseriftext]{serif} 
\usetheme{umbc2} 

The option stillsansserifmath exempts mathematics from changing to serif:

\documentclass[14pt]{beamer} 
\usefonttheme[stillsansseriftext,stillsansserifmath]{serif} 
\usetheme{umbc2} 

The font theme structuresmallcapsserif changes many document elements to the smallcap font:

\documentclass[14pt]{beamer} 
\usefonttheme{structuresmallcapsserif} 
\usetheme{umbc2}