Making it clear that colored text is a link in beamer presentation

Question

I quite often use colored text for emphasis in my Beamer presentations. I occasionally also want to include a href e.g. in my recent \href{www.my-paper.com}{paper}

I hope that these kind of of hrefs are useful for audience members/readers who download the slides from e.g. conference webpages.

What's the best style for making it absolutely obvious that it is a clickable link and not just colored text for emphasis? This is kind of a UI question. I'd prefer, furthermore, to use a single version of my presentation to upload to conference webpages and project during my talk.

Answer 1

Here is a proposal:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage[round,longnamesfirst]{natbib}
\usepackage{tikz}
% from https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/118222/how-to-provide-a-mask-highlighting-an-arrow-tip-over-a-cluttered-background-in-t
\tikzset{
    halo/.style={
        preaction={
            draw,
            white,
            line width=7,
            -
        }}}
\newcommand{\URLsymbol}{$\vcenter{\hbox{\scalebox{0.3}{\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw[-,line width=3, rounded corners] (0.3,0.3) -- (0.9,0.9) -- (1.1,0.7) --
 (0.5,0.1) -- cycle;
\draw[-,line width=3, rounded corners,halo,gray] (0,0) -- (0.6,0.6) -- (0.8,0.4) --
 (0.2,-0.2) -- cycle;
\draw[-,line width=3, rounded corners,halo] (1,0.8) -- (1.1,0.7) --
(0.5,0.1) -- (0.4,0.2);
\end{tikzpicture}}}}$}      
\begin{filecontents*}{presentation.bib}
@Article{Witten:1985xb,
     author    = "Witten, Edward",
     title     = "DIMENSIONAL REDUCTION OF SUPERSTRING MODELS",
     journal   = "Phys. Lett.",
     volume    = "B155",
     year      = "1985",
     pages     = "151",
     SLACcitation  = "%%CITATION = PHLTA,B155,151;%%"
}
\end{filecontents*}

\newcommand{\Cite}[1]{%
\URLsymbol\href{http://inspirehep.net/search?p=#1}{\citet*{#1}}
}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle{Citing and linking with beamer}
\begin{overlayarea}{\textwidth}{\textheight}
Let's cite some standard reference \Cite{Witten:1985xb}

And let's thank \URLsymbol\href{www.marmots.org}{the marmots} for being marmots
\end{overlayarea}
\end{frame}

I admit that this way of drawing a link symbol is not too elegant, but interestingly enough I was unable to find the link symbol that appears in the menu bar when typing this in this forum. This way of introducing references has the advantage that you can use your bibliography file and when posting the slides on some conference web site the reader is automatically being referred to the respective paper.