According to the stars and forks¹, the Beamer theme that I [introduced][] a year ago has filled a longstanding desire for a theme that has a simple and clean default look. It started as a one man effort but over the year I received a lot of contributions from many people, first and foremost from [Benjamin Weiss][] – author of the [HSRM theme][] that was a huge inspiration for this theme – and [Ross Churchley][]. With their help, the theme transformed from a stupid hack into a polished and highly customizable Beamer theme called Metropolis that is now available on [CTAN][]². In this post, I will quickly go through the most important changes.

Customization

Many aspects of the layout that were formerly hardcoded can now be modified using pgfkey-based package options. For example, to change the per-frame progress bar and disable the frame numbering, you can simply pass the following options when loading the theme

\usetheme[
  outer/progressbar=foot,
  outer/numbering=none
]{metropolis}

The color theme is also normalized and derives the entire look from only a few color specifications. For instance, to modify the general look you would change the normal text and alerted text colors:

\definecolor{Purple}{HTML}{911146}
\definecolor{Orange}{HTML}{CF4A30}

% Theme colors are derived from these two elements
\setbeamercolor{alerted text}{fg=Orange}

% ... however you can of course override styles of all elements
\setbeamercolor{frametitle}{bg=Purple}

Although, Metropolis is mostly recognized as a Fira Sans theme, the hard dependency quickly became a major pain point for some folks unwilling or unable to install Fira Sans. With the current version it is finally possible to compile a theme with PdfTeX or override the font as usual with

\setsansfont[BoldFont={Source Sans Pro Semibold},
              Numbers={OldStyle}]{Source Sans Pro}

You may have noticed that the frame title does not sport small caps by default anymore. We disabled them because there were too many problems lowercasing the title and typesetting the title with \textsc{}. However, if you are like me and prefer the small caps styling, you can get them back easily with

\metroset{titleformat=allsmallcaps}

As you can see, \metroset{} can be used within the document to change options on the fly. Moreover, there is a second option for a semi small caps style, i.e. all uppercased letters have a slightly larger x-height:

\metroset{titleformat=smallcaps}

Documentation

Originally, the entire theme was documented using the top-level README. With a growing number of options this approach became a bit tedious and the README totally overcrowded. Moreover, distribution on CTAN and the likes recommends a proper manual in PDF format. Thus, we moved all documentation to a real [manual][] and limit the README to installation and basic usage information. The manual itself is now derived from the documented TeX source.

The future

This is the first version in a series of stable releases, so you can expect a better theme – but still adhering to its core principles – soon. Nevertheless, the theme lives from outside contributions, be it code or bug reports, so do not hesitate to contact us on GitHub.