Working with Custom Templates

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

• How can we use the beamer class to create a presentation with Pandoc?
• How can we use custom templates with Pandoc?

Objectives

• Create a presentation in Markdown and render it to PDF using the beamer class.
• Use a custom template to create a presentation in Pandoc.
• Add LaTeX commands to a markdown file to customize the output.

The Beamer Class

---

In the previous episode we used the default document template to create a plain document. This time, we’re going to use the beamer class to create a presentation. The beamer class is a popular LaTeX class for creating slide presentations. Just like we did in the previous episode, we can create a markdown file with some content and then use Pandoc to convert it into a PDF.

Callout

Each Heading in the markdown file will be converted into a new slide in the presentation. The content of each slide will be determined by the content under the corresponding heading in the markdown file.

Let’s start with a simple markdown file that contains some headings and some content under each heading:

MARKDOWN

---
title: "My Presentation"
author: "Max Mustermann"
date: "2000-01-01"
---

# Slide 1
This is the first slide.

# Slide 2
This is the second slide.

- This is a bullet point on the second slide.
- This is another bullet point on the second slide.

As with our last document, we’ll add some metadata in the YAML front matter at the top of the file. This will be used by Pandoc to create a title slide for our presentation.

Finally, we’ll add a line to our CI/CD script to render the document:

YAML

- pandoc presentation.md --output presentation.pdf

Saving this file to our repository should trigger the pipleine. After running, you should find a PDF file that looks something like this:

Wait, what? Why doesn’t it look like a presentation? We never told Pandoc to use the beamer class, and Pandoc isn’t going to assume anything about the output format if we don’t tell it. We need to update our CI/CD script to specify that we want to use the beamer class. We can do this by adding the -t beamer option to our Pandoc command:

YAML

- pandoc presentation.md --output presentation.pdf -t beamer

That looks better!:

The RWTH Template

---

In the previous episode, we used the EisVogel template to create a simple PDF document from our Markdown source file. This time, we’re going to use a custom template that has been created for RWTH. This will require a few more steps to set up, as we will have to extend our Docker image slightly.

Installing the RWTH template

The current Pandoc image does not contain the RWTH template and its dependencies, so we will have to add some extra information to our CI/CD script. We can do this in a section called before_script, which is a section that allows us to specify commands that should be run before anything in the scripts section.

YAML

before_script:
    - tlmgr option repository https://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/tug/historic/systems/texlive/2025/tlnet-final/
    - tlmgr install rwth-ci anyfontsize tex-gyre arimo fontaxes extsizes
    - tlmgr install --reinstall beamer
    - echo '\providecommand{\tightlist}{\setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}\setlength{\parskip}{0pt}}' > header.tex

Callout

An explanation of the commands in this section:

• tlmgr is the TeX Live package manager.
• The first command sets the repository that tlmgr will use to install packages. We need to use a specific repository that contains the RWTH template and its dependencies.
  • This is required at the moment because an update in the TeX Live distribution causes errors when installing the RWTH template and its dependencies. This is a temporary workaround until the issue is resolved.
• The second command installs the RWTH template and its dependencies using tlmgr.
• The third command reinstalls the beamer package.
• The fourth command creates a header.tex file that contains a definition for the \tightlist command. This command is used in the template by pandoc, and is not defined by default.

Finally, we need to update our pandoc command to tell it to use the RWTH template. We can do this by specifically telling pandoc that we want to use the rwth-beamer class.

Callout

We also need to tell pandoc to use the header.tex file that we created in the before_script section. This is done using the --include-in-header option. The template uses the \tightlist command, which is not defined by default, so we have defined it in the header.tex file to avoid errors when rendering the document.

Our final pandoc command should look like this:

YAML

pandoc presentation.md -t beamer --output presentation_rwth.pdf -V documentclass=rwth-beamer --include-in-header=header.tex

And when we run the pipeline, we should get a PDF file that looks something like this:

The Missing Logo File

Our template is missing one last thing - the logo file. The template prints out a message that says Missing Logo file rwth_mx>. First off, we need a logo file. We can find an example file in the RWTH-LaTeX-Templates repository. For our project, we will download the rwth_mx_cmyk.pdf file and add it to the root of our repository.

If we were writing a LaTeX document, we would add the logo file as one of the parameters to the document class, like this:

LATEX

\documentclass[logofile=img/rwth_mx_rgb]{rwth-beamer}

We can do the same thing with pandoc by adding to the YAML front matter of our markdown file:

YAML

---
title: "My Presentation"
author: "Max Mustermann"
date: "2000-01-01"
classoption:
  - logofile=rwth-mx-cmyk
---

Our slides should now look like this:

Adding LaTeX Commands to the Template

We can do all of the basic formatting and content in our markdown file, but we are of course somewhat limited in what we can do with markdown alone. There are may additional options we can perform by adding LaTeX commands to our markdown file. Try updating your markdown file like this:

MARKDOWN

---
title: "My Presentation"
author: "Max Mustermann"
date: "2000-01-01"
classoption:
  - logofile=rwth-mx-cmyk
---

# Slide 1
This is the first slide.

# Slide 2
This is the second slide.

- This is a bullet point on the second slide.

/pause

- This is another bullet point on the second slide.

After running the pipeline, you should see that the third slide is now split into two slides, with the first bullet point appearing on the second slide, and the second bullet point appearing on a third slide. This is because the /pause command tells the beamer class to pause the slide at that point and wait for the user to click before showing the rest of the content.

Challenge

Challenge 1: Adding an alert to a Slide

At the end of the episode, we added a /pause command to our markdown file to split a slide into two slides. The beamer class also has an \alert command. Try adding the following content to your markdown file:

MARKDOWN

# Slide 3

- \alert<1>{This is a bullet point on the third slide.}
- \alert<2>{This is another bullet point on the third slide.}
- \alert<3>{This is yet another bullet point on the third slide.}

What does this do? What happens if you change the numbers in the alert commands? What happens if you remove the numbers?

Show me the solution

The \alert command is used to highlight specific content on a slide. The numbers in the alert commands specify the order in which the content will be highlighted. If you remove the numbers, all of the content will be highlighted at the same time.

Key Points

• The beamer class is a popular LaTeX class for creating slide presentations.
• We can use custom templates with Pandoc to create more complex documents.