beamernavigationthemes
I'm curious what would be an effective work-around for the Beamer tree outer theme package that would allow for two-level navigation instead of the default three-level navigation.
For example, I'm rather partial to this format: http://www.math.umbc.edu/~rouben/beamer/beamer_pstricks.pdf
In this presentation, the subsubsection is a horizontal tree to the subsection. How would I go about doing this? Any input would be appreciated.
The problem here is that the outer theme smoothbars uses the beamer option compress in order to get the mini frames into one single line, while miniframes doesn't do that by default. So in order to remove the spurious space, you need to activate this compression, which can be done by saying
\beamer@compresstrue
in beamerthemeM21.sty (enclosed in \makeatletter ... \makeatother, of course).
BTW: You don't need to use \setcounter{subsection}{1} in each section as in your MWE, doing this once (e. g. in your theme file) is enough.
So the corrected beamerthemeM21.sty looks like this:
\usepackage{remreset}
\makeatletter
\@removefromreset{subsection}{section}
\beamer@compresstrue
\makeatother
\setcounter{subsection}{1}
\mode<presentation>
\setbeamercovered{transparent}
\mode<all>
\useoutertheme[subsection=false]{miniframes}
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
This can be obtained by patching the internal beamer commands responsible for creating the mini frame navigation:
\documentclass[compress]{beamer}
\useoutertheme[subsection=false]{miniframes}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\patchcmd{\slideentry}{\advance\beamer@tempdim by -.05cm}{\advance\beamer@tempdim by\beamer@vboxoffset\advance\beamer@tempdim by\beamer@boxsize\advance\beamer@tempdim by 1.2\pgflinewidth}{}{}
\patchcmd{\slideentry}{\kern\beamer@tempdim}{\advance\beamer@tempdim by 2pt\advance\beamer@tempdim by\wd\beamer@sectionbox\kern\beamer@tempdim}{}{}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\section{Sec 1}
\subsection{}
\frame{}\frame{}\frame{}\frame{}
\section{Sec 2}
\subsection{}
\frame{}\frame{}\frame{}\frame{}
\end{document}
This hack moves the mini frames one line up* and (length of the section title + 2pt) units to the right, to end up in the desired position:
I have also added the compress option to the minimal working example, as if you have multiple subsections in your presentation, it may look strange if each subsection starts in a new line.
*To be more precise, it's one line plus 1.2\pgflinewidth: The default circular mini frames descend exactly the amount of \pfglinewidth below the baseline, so I raised them to be a tiny amount above the baseline. You may have to play around with this value a little, especially if you use another mini frame style (box, tick) than the default circle.
Best Answer
You can redefine the
headlinetemplate as defined inbeamerouterthemetree.sty, to give you the desired layout; something along these lines:Some images of the resulting headlines, showing the desired layout:
and