Beamer with Powerpoint title page in LyX

Question

I want to use beamer (Madrid style) for a presentation I'm giving next week, but I am forced to use the institutional title page.

That means that the whole background is filled by an image and the title itself cannot be in a coloured box.

In the worst case I will have to pdftk the title page onto the presentation, but I'm sure there must be a way to force LaTeX to do it.

I've tried using a PlainFrame with a TitleGraphic, but

• I can't get the image to stretch across the whole page
• the title itself will still be in a coloured box

Any ideas???

Answer 1

Since you want to suppress the coloured box for the title, you'll need a redefinition of the title page template defined by the default inner theme used by Madrid.

To suppress the footline from the titlepage, you can use the plain option for the frame.

To include the image, you can set the background canvas template, using a standard \includegraphics (of course, instead of papiro, use one of your own images) command.

To keep all these changes local, you can use the grouping mechanism.

A little example:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Madrid}

\makeatletter
\defbeamertemplate*{title page}{mytitlepage}[1][]
{
  \vbox{}
  \vfill
  \begin{centering}
    \begin{beamercolorbox}[sep=8pt,center,#1]{}
      \usebeamerfont{title}\inserttitle\par%
      \ifx\insertsubtitle\@empty%
      \else%
        \vskip0.25em%
        {\usebeamerfont{subtitle}\usebeamercolor[fg]{subtitle}\insertsubtitle\par}%
      \fi%     
    \end{beamercolorbox}%
    \vskip1em\par
    \begin{beamercolorbox}[sep=8pt,center,#1]{author}
      \usebeamerfont{author}\insertauthor
    \end{beamercolorbox}
    \begin{beamercolorbox}[sep=8pt,center,#1]{institute}
      \usebeamerfont{institute}\insertinstitute
    \end{beamercolorbox}
    \begin{beamercolorbox}[sep=8pt,center,#1]{date}
      \usebeamerfont{date}\insertdate
    \end{beamercolorbox}\vskip0.5em
    {\usebeamercolor[fg]{titlegraphic}\inserttitlegraphic\par}
  \end{centering}
  \vfill
}
\makeatother

\title{A Modified Beamer Theme}
\subtitle{Background image and no special decorations}
\author{The Author}
\institute{The Institute}

\begin{document}

\begingroup
\setbeamertemplate{background canvas}{\includegraphics[width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight]{papiro}}
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
\begin{frame}[plain]
\maketitle
\end{frame}
\endgroup

\begin{frame}
\frametitle{A regular frame}
test
\end{frame}

\end{document}