Problems with LaTeX Beamer (and a fix)

From korrekt.org

Sept 24 2007. The otherwise nice beamer package for LaTeX recently broke on my (K)Ubuntu Feisty installation. The symptoms are pieces of text becoming hidden or invisible in certain beamer themes, as described in this bug report. Here is my workaround.

The above bugreport already indicates that the problem relates to the theme used. In fact, honly themes that use rounded corners for boxes seem to be affected. So one possible fix is to choose another theme. Now I like to use Madrid and I found that there is no theme (at least in my beamer documentation) that has the same configuration of headers and footer but omits the round boxes. The talk being only a few hours in the future, I had to come up with another fix …

I found that the invisible/faded out texts could generally be restored by using the command

\usebeamercolor*{normal text}

I found this to be necessary in two places:

• After each box (block, alertblock, exampleblock), and
• at the beginning of each frame.

Some kinds of text, especially itemized content, seemed to be unaffected by the problem, so sometimes problems would occur only somewhat after their actual cause. I found, however, that the use of boxes seems to be the main issue, so I ran the above command directly after the end of any such box.

In order to automatically run the fix at the beginning of each frame (which I still needed to do for some strange reason), one can simply extend the frametitle command. In the preamble of your document, write:

\let\origframetitle\frametitle
\renewcommand{\frametitle}[1]{%
  \origframetitle{#1}\usebeamercolor*{normal text}%
}

This fixes all frames (at least all with a frametitle). But, by the subtleties of LaTeX, it also can create problems at some places. I encountered issues like mislabeled frames when producing a multi-page bibliography. Therefore, to return to the original command anywhere during your talk, just write

\let\frametitle\origframetitle

In this case, you may need to execute \usebeamercolor manually after beginning new frames. You could also define the fix as another command \newframetitle so that you can switch back and forth by another \let. I did not find this to be necessary in my case.

I trust that the problem will be fixed in the packages at some time. So if you do not use the package latex-beamer 3.06.dfsg.1-0.1 (feisty), the above may not be your problem.