Introduction
I’ve been creating a Beamer theme for presentation slides in a course that I’m about developing. One quick way to use a custom beamer theme is to just put all the theme files into the same folder as your tex files.
That does not work well when you have multiple presentations you want to use the same theme for. I did a bit of research on how to get this done and below is a summary of what I did.
The instructions below are for installing a custom beamer theme so that you can use them in any tex file.
Instructions
Step 1: Find the directory where your latex packages are installed.
kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFLOCAL
Note: Use TEXMFHOME if you just want to install it for yourself and no other users
Step 2: The directory you get will be the root directory for all packages. On my computer (Ubuntu 20.04), it was the following
/usr/local/share/texmf/
Step 3: Beamer Themes are installed in the following path
/usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer-THEMENAME/
Step 4: Create the required directory by using mkdir. Since this is in a system directory, remember to use sudo. the -p flag in mkdir is to create the parent directories if they do not exist
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer-mytheme/
Step 5: Copy the beamer theme files into the newly created directory
Step 6: We need to update the latex package index with the texhash command. Remember to use sudo.
sudo texhash
Step 7: Your custom beamer theme is ready to use
This was just what I needed. Thanks Jeffrey!