Re: Exporting a presentation to both slides and handouts?

[Jacek Generowicz <jacek.generowicz@cern.ch>]

At Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:26:13 -0500,
John Hendy wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 3:49 AM, Jacek Generowicz
> <jacek.generowicz@cern.ch> wrote:
> > At Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:14:00 +0100,
> > Alan Schmitt wrote:
> >>
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I'm finishing a presentation with org-mode which is exported as
> >> beamer slides. I would like to also export it as a handouts, which
> >> basically means changing a couple lines in the preamble.
> >
> > On a related note, I'm looking to produce both slides (sparse) and
> > notes (dense) from a single org file. (Something akin to S5's handout
> > class, though I would be happy for the slides and notes to be
> > completely separate products, as long as their contents are extracted
> > from the same org source).
> >
> > Any hints on org mode goodies which can help with this sort of thing?
> >
> 
> So are you just looking for something to automate this? It seems that
> the generation of the beamer slides themselves are the hard part and,
> as you say, it would be pretty easy to tweak the resultant .tex file
> to give you handouts. Would that work?
> 
> You can add LaTeX class options to org-mode, and so you could export
> once for the beamer presentation and then export again with the
> handout class option added?
> 
> #+latex_class_options: [handout]
> 
> which produces:
> 
> \documentclass[handout]{beamer}
> 
> in the resultant file.
> 
> I haven't made handouts before, but this email got me interested. It
> seems that all this option does is "flatten" the transitions and
> overlays and whatnot? From there it seems one still needs to do
> something to the file to layout the handouts n-up on a page.
> 
> So... if you don't have overlays, perhaps you don't need to do
> anything to the presentation at all.
> 
> Just use a new document to layout the handouts how you want? I also
> stumbled upon pdfjam, which looks like it aims to accomplish this step
> more easily: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic-research/firth/software/pdfjam
> 
> They have this example:
> ---
> A useful application of pdfjam is for producing a handout from a file
> of presentation slides. For slides made with the standard 4:3 aspect
> ratio a nice 6-up handout on A4 paper can be made by
> 
>   pdfjam --nup 2x3 --frame true --noautoscale false --delta "0.2cm 0.3cm" \
>          --scale 0.95 myslides.pdf --outfile myhandout.pdf
> ---

Although I (who wrote the followup to the OP) can't speak for Alan
(the OP), it seems that his requirement is different from mine. It
looks like you are addressing Alan's requirement.

Perhaps a few more words to explain what I'm after wouldn't go amiss.

When giving, talks, presentations, lectures, tutorials, etc. I would
like to have sparse slides, whose main purpose is to establish an
order for the talk (remind me what to say next), and to highlight the
key messages. They need to be easily legible from the back of the room
and should not drown the listeners in detail. By this very nature,
they are almost useless as a handout, because their information
content is visible. I want the handout to go into detail: it should
contain pretty much anything that I might say in the talk while any
given slide is being displayed, as well as anticipating any questions
that might be raised in relation to that slide. But the important
thing is that the slides an the handout belong together: they are the
same material, presented in (essentially) the same order, the only
difference being that the slides are a view from 10000 ft, while the
handout is the real thing. You might think of the slides as the
highlights of the handout.

I've done this with S5 in the past, where it looks like this:

<div class="slide">
  <h1>Broad Topic</h1>
  <ul class="incremental">
    <li> My first point <div class="handout"> A few additional words</div></li>
    <li> My second point
	<div class="handout">
	   My second point is a really involved one, so here I might
           write many paragraphs, explaining it in great detail.
	</div>
    </li>
    <li> My third point, which doesn't need any further explanation</li>
  </ul>
  <div class="handout">
    Some more stuff, which isn't directly pertinent to any of the
    first three specific points, but pertains to the Broad Topic
    discussed on this slide. Again, there might be many paragraphs or
    even pages here, source code, graphs, bibliography, etc.
  </div>
</div>

Anything belonging to the "handout" class, will *not* be displayed on
the slides, everything else will appear on the slides.


In summary, what appears on the slides is entirely different from what
appears on the handout, (though the former might be a subset of the
latter), but the contents of both documents should be extracted from
the same flow of information in a single org file.

(Also, I'm not necessarily committed to LaTeX-based export options: I
am approximately equally interested in HTML-based ones too.)


If anybody has any experience with, or ideas about this sort of thing,
I'd love to hear them.