clean-beamer

A minimalist Beamer theme — a LaTeX port of the Typst touying-quarto-clean slide theme (itself based on Grant McDermott's Clean theme for Quarto + Reveal.js).

See the rendered result in demo.pdf

Use

Put beamerthemeClean.sty next to your .tex file and:

\documentclass[aspectratio=169]{beamer}
\usepackage[sfdefault, light]{roboto}
\usepackage[scaled]{FiraMono}
\usetheme{Clean}

Alternatively clone the repo and use the demo.tex as a template or fork the repo and import using Overleaf's GitHub integration.

See demo.tex for a full, self-contained example.

Features

• Left-aligned frame titles with an optional italic, primary-coloured subtitle (\framesubtitle).
• List markers in the primary accent: level 1 filled triangle, level 2 arrow, level 3 dot; enumerate nesting 1. / i. / a..
• Slide counter x / y in the bottom-right footer.
• Automatic section slides — every \section{...} produces a large primary-coloured section page (via \AtBeginSection).
• \alert{...} uses the secondary accent colour; \textcolor{cleanPrimary}{...} (and cleanSecondary, cleanJet) are available for inline colour.
• A richer title page with an authors grid — see below.

Author grid with ORCID

Instead of \author, you can list authors with optional ORCID, email and affiliation. Each call adds one cell; the title page lays them out in up to three columns:

\cleanauthor{Your Name}{0009-0007-1967-8304}{you@inst.edu}{Your Institution}
\cleanauthor{Coauthor}{}{coauthor@other.edu}{Other Institution}

Any of the ORCID / email / affiliation arguments may be left empty ({}). Put each author's affiliation in the 4th argument; a document-level \institute{...} is still shown beneath the grid if you set one. If no \cleanauthor is given, the title page falls back to plain \author / \institute.

Citations

The demo uses biblatex-chicago with the biber backend for true Chicago author–date references:

\usepackage[authordate, backend=biber, natbib=true]{biblatex-chicago}
\addbibresource{references.bib}

natbib=true exposes the familiar \citet / \citep commands alongside biblatex's native \textcite / \parencite, so all four work:

command	renders
\citet{key}	Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021)
\citep{key}	(Callaway and Sant'Anna 2021)
\textcite{key}	Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021)
\parencite{key}	(Callaway and Sant'Anna 2021)

biber runs automatically under latexmk in CI. Print the bibliography with \printbibliography.

Figures

Drop a .png or .pdf next to your .tex and include it the usual way — both raster and vector figures work under pdflatex, and captions are styled to match the theme (small, primary-coloured label):

\begin{figure}
  \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{figures/example-plot.png}
  \caption{A raster .png plot.}
\end{figure}

The figures/ directory holds the two examples used by the demo (example-plot.png, example-diagram.pdf), generated by the stdlib-only figures/make_figures.py.

Fonts & engine

The baseline uses pdflatex with the roboto and FiraMono packages, which bundle the fonts inside TeX Live — no system-font install, reliable in CI. Body and headings are Roboto Light; code is Fira Mono.

Optional LuaLaTeX route (for true Fira Code with ligatures): switch to LuaLaTeX and use fontspec:

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmonofont{Fira Code}

This needs the font available on the build machine (Fira Code is not guaranteed to be in TeX Live, so vendor the .ttfs or install them on the runner) and the workflow set to latexmk_use_lualatex: true. The pdflatex baseline avoids all of that, which is why it's the default.

Building

This repo does not assume any local LaTeX install. Every push is compiled by GitHub Actions, which uploads the resulting demo.pdf as a build artifact (Actions → latest run → Artifacts → demo-pdf).

To build locally: latexmk -pdf demo.tex.

License & attribution

This Beamer theme is released under the MIT License, © 2026 Andrea Recine.

It is a derivative port of two MIT-licensed upstream projects, whose copyright and permission notices are preserved in reference/LICENSE-upstream:

• quarto-clean-typst (the Typst / Touying theme this port follows) — © 2024 Kazuharu Yanagimoto. Its source is vendored read-only under reference/.
• Grant McDermott's Clean theme for Quarto + Reveal.js (the original design) — © 2023 Grant McDermott.

With thanks to both authors for the original work.