First a preview (excerpt) of what this post is about:

Selecting something from a set of candidates works much better when you have comfortable access to all of them. Selecting a theme (and color theme) for a Beamer presentation within an edit-compile-evaluate loop takes time and makes comparison unnecessarily hard. Johannes Buchner automated this procedure to some extent in 2007. I built on his idea and took it to the next level. I create an overview tables showing all possible combinations: Along the x-axis we have color themes, along the y-axis themes. Two different kinds of slides - a title page and a regular content page - are compiled against each combination of theme and color theme. The output is

• Set of .png files
• Directory tree allowing you to fix any two dimensions, e.g. the folder ./output/by-page/title/by-theme/Malmoe contains files that show
  • title pages
  • with theme "Malmoe"
  • running through all color themes.
• Overview table ("matrix") showing thumbnails of all images at once

The script is available under GPLv3 or later. Non-obvious dependencies are

• wiki2beamer
• OptiPNG
• ImageMagick

You can find the sources at the beamer-theme-matrix Git repository.