Re: Exporting a presentation to both slides and handouts?

[John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com>]

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
---

Good luck!
John