# beamer: change individual bullet color in itemize list

Is there a "nice" way to change the color of individual bullet points? For example imagine a list like this:

\begin{itemize}
\item A
\begin{itemize}
\item pro 1
\item con 1
\item pro 2
\end{itemize}
\item B
\begin{itemize}
\item pro 3
\item con 2
\item con 3
\end{itemize}
\end{itemize}


How can I make pro bullets green and cons bullets red?

BTW.: I use the circle innertheme

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– Martin Scharrer Mar 26 '11 at 21:12
While the above linked questions explain how to change the itemize styles in beamer globally or per-item for a normal document, I couldn't find one explaining how to change the used beamer style for single \items yet. This makes this question IMHO a non-duplicate. – Martin Scharrer Mar 26 '11 at 21:21
Welcome to TeX.SX. You don't need to put "Latex" (which should be written as LaTeX) into the title (or the tag list) on this site, because everything here is about (La)TeX anyway. You can also use back-ticks  to mark inline code, package names and settings. See tex.stackexchange.com/editing-help for a full list. – Martin Scharrer Mar 26 '11 at 21:24

Here's a more beamer way to do things.

The idea is to make an "action" environment that changes the bullet colour.

\documentclass{beamer}
\useinnertheme{circles}
\newenvironment{proenv}{\only{\setbeamercolor{local structure}{fg=green}}}{}
\newenvironment{conenv}{\only{\setbeamercolor{local structure}{fg=red}}}{}
\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\frametitle{Some pros and cons}
\begin{itemize}
\item<pro@1-> A pro item
\item<con@1-> A con item
\item A neutral  item
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\end{document}


The syntax of adding the action requires you to specify the slide range that the action will apply to; you should set this to 1- (which means slide 1 and all further slides) otherwise the colour will change back to the default colour theme if you are uncovering any parts of the slide.

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Why is it impossible to get colored items if you add \setbeamercolor{item}{fg=blue} in the beginning of the document? Is there a way to avoid it to override everything? – s__C Apr 23 '14 at 14:57
@s__C I'm not quite sure the reason, but as a fix you can replace local structure with item in my code and things will work as advertised. – Alan Munn Apr 23 '14 at 15:23
Just one thing remaining : why is it also coloring all items that are one level below (encapsulated itemize)? – s__C Apr 23 '14 at 15:31
@s__C Because that semantically makes sense? :) But I'm not sure how the inheritance structure works in Beamer, so I don't have a quick answer to that, nor much time to investigate. – Alan Munn Apr 23 '14 at 15:54

You can define new commands based on \item and use its optional argument to obtain colored bullets; I don't know if this is "nice", though:

\documentclass{beamer}

\newcommand*\MyPitem{%
\item[\color{green}\scalebox{0.9}{\textbullet}]}
\newcommand*\MyCitem{%
\item[\color{red}\scalebox{0.9}{\textbullet}]}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}
\item A
\begin{itemize}
\MyPitem pro 1
\MyCitem con 1
\MyPitem pro 2
\end{itemize}
\item B
\begin{itemize}
\MyPitem pro 3
\MyCitem con 2
\MyCitem con 3
\end{itemize}
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\end{document}


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True, but this is more a duplicate of How to define a list with custom symbols?. See my comments under the question. – Martin Scharrer Mar 27 '11 at 9:37
@Martin Scharrer: yes, I didn't read the question you linked; should I delete my answer? – Gonzalo Medina Mar 27 '11 at 12:48
No, it not really necessary. Your example includes the textbullets which some people might want. – Martin Scharrer Mar 27 '11 at 12:54
This answer is extremely useful in case you need to adjust symbol and color. Thanks. – Jan-Philip Gehrcke Feb 17 '13 at 10:41

I was with the same problem. But I figured it out you could use the "\bullet" command and change its color:

\begin{itemize}
\item[\textcolor{green}{$\bullet$}] Pro:
\item[\textcolor{red}{$\bullet$}] Con:
\item[\textcolor{blue}{$\bullet$}] Neutral:
\end{itemize}


Result:

If you want to create a new command with this \textcolor{blue}{$\bullet$}` it would be even better.

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