9  The UMBC footline

The Beamer outer theme umbcfootline puts footer information along the bottom edges of slides. The default footline looks like this:

where n is the sequence number of this frame and N is the total number of frames.

The fields Author, Institute, Title and Subtitle are filled with the data supplied by the \author, \institute, \title and \subtitle commands. Short versions of these entries are used, if provided, otherwise long versions are used. See Titlepage elements for the meanings of “long” and “short” fields.

You invoke the umbcfootline theme by putting the following in your document’s preamble:

\useoutertheme{umbcfootline} 

In the following example, I have added a umbcfootline to Beamer’s default theme:

\documentclass{beamer} 
\usetheme{default} 
\useoutertheme{umbcfootline} 
\author{Rouben Rostamian} 
\title{Beamer tutorial} 
\institute{UMBC} 

UMBC themes umbc1, umbc2 and umbc4 include umbcfootline by default, therefore there is no need to invoke umbcfootline explicitly with these themes.

Redefining the footline

You may override the default contents of a umbcfootline with the \setfootline command. For instance, to change the footline to:

put the following in the preamble:

\useoutertheme{umbcfootline} 
\setfootline{\insertshortinstitute, \insertshortdate 
    \hfill slide \insertframenumber/\inserttotalframenumber} 

Items that you can \insert... in a footline, are:

• \insertshortauthor

• \insertshortinstitute

• \insertshorttitle

• \insertshortsubtitle

• \insertshortdate

• \insertframenumber

• \inserttotalframenumber

If you use \insertshortauthor and if “short author” is not provided, then “long author” is substituted for it. The same applies to the other \insertshort... fields. See Titlepage elements for the meanings of “long” and “short” fields.

If you really want to insert the long versions of the requested field, use \insertauthor, \inserttitle, etc.

Dynamic footlines

To change the footline of an individual slide, put a \setfootline{...} command just before the slide’s \begin{frame}. This will change the footline of this and all subsequent slides.

To limit the change only to one slide, limit the scope of the \setfootline by enclosing it in braces, as in:

{ % brace limits \setfootline's scope 
\setfootline{...} 
\begin{frame} 
... 
\end{frame} 
} % brace limits \setfootline's scope