[XeTeX] XeTeX and Beamer Package

[Berteun Damman]

On 11/13/07, Stefan Pohl <stefan.pohl at ish.de> wrote:
> I use the beamer package, but there I have no option to choose the ScalaSans
> LF-Regular font.
> In XeTeX I can choose this type of font. But I don`t know which changes I
> have to make in my code.
> In the beamer package I have used cmbright. Here is my code. The resulting
> pdf-file is attached.

The key here are the 'fontthemes' used by beamer. Section 18 of the
manual (for version 3.07) explains these. By default beamer switches
to using sans-serif for the presentation, so you have to use fontspec
and \setsansfont{ScalaSansLF-Regular}.

By default Beamer will also use some glyphs from the text font in the
mathematical font, i.e. $a^2 + b^2 = c^2$ will show up with 'a', 'b'
and 'c' coming from your ScalaSans. The superscripts however will
*not* be scala sans.

Because XeTeX cannot (as of yet) use an OT font for maths, math will
look a bit peculiar with some of the glyphs coming from ScalaSans,
some coming from Computer Modern (such as the + and the =). You can of
course switch in and out of math mode rather frequently, or sprinkle
your math-environments with \text{...} commands from the amsmath
package but these are suboptimal solutions.

If you use the fonttheme professionalfonts, by entering
\usetheme{professionalfonts}, Beamer will not perform glyph
substitution in the math environment, and you could load something
like the euler package or cmbright for the math fonts.

Remember that if you run XeTeX on a Mac you have to use the
output-driver 'xdvipdfmx' in order for beamer and pgf to work
properly. You might also need to supply the [dvipdfm] option to the
beamer class so it will use the right special-commands.

Berteun