Where to find the documentation to beamer elements?

Question

I am on the way to create/customize a beamer template. Therefore I read the relevant chapters in the beameruserguide.

I think I understood the basic idea behind the theme setup and the use of the \setbeamer***{}{} commands.

There is always spoken of some beamer element. Yes, there are some examples, what could be used as these elements, but I do not see a list of all relevant elements reachable by default.

Also some commands seems not to be documented in the user manual (I did not find for example \beamertemplatenavigationsymbolsempty).

Where are such things documented or is there only a learning by doing way to understand things (in dozens of years)?

Answer 1

There's no easy way.

You can find the code for the themes in /.../tex/latex/beamer/themes/theme/ (/usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf-dist/tex/latex/beamer/themes/theme/)

\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{} is in the manual (page 72), \beamertemplatenavigationsymbolsempty is probably old code that is not documented anymore.

Or try the cheat sheet described in Custom headline in LaTeX Beamer?

As a last resort, you can look through the beamer.cls and its various .sty files.