Using Beamer in RMarkdown: Change list item bullet point styles

I’ve recently gotten started with using Beamer in RMarkdown (RMD). Some of the Beamer advice is for those using Latex or other programs directly, so I thought I would share how to incorporate some minor template changes for things such as bullet points when working with Beamer in RMarkdown.

First, let’s create a 3-level nested list in the RMD file itself:

Create a nested list

Make sure to put 4 spaces before a sub-item’s symbol, and 4+4 spaces before a sub-sub-item’s symbol.

This outputs as all triangles:

Default bullet style

To change the bullet point style:

We can make Latex commands to set the style, but we must put these in the RMD header section, under “header-includes:” as follows:

Change bullet point style

To produce:

Changed bullet point style output

For more symbols, try substituting in “\square”, “\circle”, “\ball”, and so on, between the $ signs. The escape backslash is needed if using Latex symbols, but literal text you wish to use as a bullet point symbol (“X”, “o”, “>>”) can be inserted without a backslash.

Done!

(You can also take out the command).

Solution patched together from (https://latex-beamer.com/faq/bullet-style/) (Latex); (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59741387/specify-innertheme-for-an-rmarkdown-beamer-presentation) (RMarkdown integration of Latex commands).

What are the options for the bullet point symbols?

Your options for the bullet point symbols are:

1. Common Beamer options seem to be: “\triangle”, “\circle”, “\square”, “\diamond”, and “\ball”. For filled-in symbols, try “\blacksquare”, “\blacktriangle”, “\blacklozenge”, and so on. (The filled-in colour will depend on the theme). “\default” can be used to replace a theme’s bullet points back to RMD/Beamer defaults.
2. Any Latex character. “\Longrightarrow”, “\Rightarrow”, “\Omega”, “\gg”, “\infty”, “\bowtie”, and so on. A full list is here: https://oeis.org/wiki/List_of_LaTeX_mathematical_symbols.
3. Any literal text within the dollar sign marks. Do not put the escape backslash.
4. Wingdings glyphs. You will need to insert the line ” - \usepackage:{pifont}” into the header to access the Wingding symbols via Latex package ‘pifont’. See below for an implementation. Wingding symbols have an escape slash, but no $ signs around them.

Using Wingdings symbols as bullet points

You will need to edit the header as follows:

Bullet points from Wingdings font: see header code. Styles can be mixed: The ‘item’ and ‘subitem’ levels are Wingdings, and ‘subsubitem’ is a regular Latex character.

For output:

Wingdings bullet points

Some more variations:

More Latex symbols – code

More Latex symbols – output

More Latex symbols – code

More Latex symbols – output

Code to copy:

---
title: "Nested List Blog Post"
author: "Catherine Moez"
date: "May 23, 2023"
output: beamer_presentation
header-includes:
  - \setbeamertemplate{itemize item}{\scriptsize$\blacksquare$}
  - \setbeamertemplate{itemize subitem}{\scriptsize$\blacklozenge$}
  - \setbeamertemplate{itemize subsubitem}{\scriptsize$\blacktriangle$}

---