LaTeX Cookbook

Adding shape, shading, and transparency

While tables in books and theses are expected to be sober, presentations at talks are often more colorful. In this recipe, we will take a look at how to add graphical elements, such as rounded borders and shaded colors, to tables.

How to do it...

We will use the beamer class, which is very popular for doing presentations. We will take an ordinary tabular environment, put it into a TikZ node, and add shape and color using TikZ.

It's a challenging example, but it shows what we can achieve. Follow these steps:

1. Choose the beamer class, remove the navigation symbols argument, and add a background template with some shading:

   \documentclass{beamer} \setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{} \setbeamertemplate{background ...