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Sun 07 October 2012

Beamer: making hand outs for your presentations

Posted by ankur in Tech (381 words, approximately a 2 minute read)


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It's often handy to create hand-outs for your presentations. (I need them for my master's assessments at the moment). It's really simple to make hand-outs. What we do is first create a presentation, like we normally do. Then, since the presentation generally contains overlays (the pause command and more), we make another version where these commands are ignored. That's the most of it. I go ahead another step and create another TeX file to print multiple slides in a single page.

As you'll notice, between the presentation, and it's hand out version, the only change is in the documentclass options, where you add a "handout" option in the latter. Instead of copy pasting and keeping these two files in sync, a smart thing to do is to write everything other than the documentclass line in another text file and then simply include it using an input command in two files for the two versions.

So, the files you have are:

  1. mypresentation-src.tex: the file that contains your entire presentation, other than the documentclass line
  2. mypresentation.tex: this file will contain the documentclass line for your presentation
  3. mypresentation-hand-out.tex: this file contains another documentclass line for your presentation's hand-out version where overlays are ignored
  4. mypresentation-hand-out-print-multiple.tex: this file will generate a pdf file with multiple slides on a single page

This is what your mypresentation-src.tex file looks like (Observe the lack of a document class definition):

usepackage{color}

% links, urls, refs
definecolor{links}{HTML}{2A1B81}
usepackage{hyperref}
hypersetup{colorlinks,linkcolor=,urlcolor=links}

% graphics
usepackage{graphicx}

% algorithm
usepackage{algorithmic}

usepackage{textcomp}

% beamer theme
% use defaults for theme
usetheme{Berlin}
usecolortheme[RGB={41,65,114}]{structure}
logo{includegraphics[width=2.5cm,angle=0]{uts-logo.jpg}}

%% title %%
title{Week review: October 2 2012}
author[Ankur Sinha]{Ankur SinhaUTS ID: 11484312}
institute{University of Technology, Sydney}
date{October 2 2012}

%% document begins %%
begin{document}

%% title frame %%
begin{frame}
titlepage

end{frame}

.....
..
...
end{document}

This is how your mypresentation.tex file looks like:

documentclass[usenames,dvipsnames,10pt]{beamer}
input{mypresentation-src.tex}

This is how your mypresentation-hand-out.tex file looks like (Observe that the only addition is the "handout" option):

documentclass[usenames,dvipsnames,10pt,handout]{beamer}
input{mypresentation-src.tex}

This is how your mypresentation-hand-out-print.tex file looks like:

documentclass[a4paper]{article}
usepackage{pdfpages}

begin{document}
includepdf[pages=1-last,nup=2x2,landscape=false,frame=true,
noautoscale=true,scale=0.6,delta=5mm 5mm]{mypresentation-hand-out.pdf}
end{document}

You need to compile the 3 TeX files (not the mypresentation-src.tex file). Note that the -hand-out-print.tex file should be compiled last, since it requires the hand-out.pdf file. It's pretty simple. I ran in to all of this via Google of course. I just thought it'd be nice to have it all in one place. Hope it helps. Cheers!


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