Handouts & Beamer

While preparing the slides for my talk at Bayes2013 next week, I stumbled on a slight LaTeX problem. Creating the talk with overlays is easy and the results are really good. But often you need to create handouts, in which case overlays are not too helpful.

This is not new (although I just found out, so that’s new to me and I thought I shared it), but you can sort this out by using

\documentclass[10pt,handout]{beamer}

(the option handout effectively removes all the overlays).

In addition, the code

\usepackage{handoutWithNotes,pgf,pgfpages}
\pgfpagesuselayout{4 on 1 with notes}[a4paper,border shrink=5mm]

formats the handouts so that 4 slides are showed on a single A4 paper, with some space for notes to the right.

This works OK to remove the effect of the \pause command. But if overlays are created using, for example, the command \only, then the above method doesn’t really work with the handouts. The problem can be fixed by adding a specific option for the handouts, something like

\only<1|handout:1>{What's to be showed only on the first overlay}

Some more discussion on this issue, here.