[Tex/LaTex] Beamer: handout/article mode – produce multiple copies of a frame with distinct overlay numbers

beamerbeamerarticleoverlays

Similar questions have been asked before, but I was unable to come up with a general purpose solution out of the answers provided.

First, here is a MWE:

%\documentclass{beamer}
\documentclass[handout]{beamer}
%\documentclass{article}
%\usepackage{beamerarticle}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}[label=foo]\frametitle{My only frame}
  \begin{enumerate}[]
    \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \item Item \arabic{enumi}
  \end{enumerate}
\end{frame}

\againframe{foo}
\againframe{foo}
\end{document}

As can be seen in the example, the challenge is in producing two snapshots of the evolution of the frame that is built. In the example, I try, but fail to produce two such snapshots: one at overlay 5 and another at (the final) overlay 10.

I am search for a solution that would make this possible, without modifying the overlay instructions within the frame. If this is not possible, I guess not only me, but others would be interested in a solution that uses O(k) modifications to the frame, where k is the number of snapshots (rather than O(n) work, where n is the total number of overlays.

It would be really nice to achieve this in both the article and the handout modes. I suspect that the former is more challenging.

I conjecture that this is not possible. If this is indeed the case, a definite answer will also be useful. At least one stop searching if this is the case, and perhaps beamer will offer this some day.

Related previous questions

Best Answer

You do need to tell beamer what you want to appear in each frame of the handout version. You can use \onslide specifications to do this so that you do not need to modify the existing overlay specifications at all. (I'm not sure this is what you want - probably not.)

The following code modifies your MWE so that, in presentation mode, there would actually be 10 slides within the frame. These are then placed on slides 1 or 2 of the handout. This is a waste of code: if you only want to show slide 5 and slide 10, you do not need two \againframe but only one. But, anyway, with the two:

\documentclass[handout]{beamer}

\begin{document}

  \begin{frame}<1-| handout:0>[label=foo]{My only frame}
    \begin{enumerate}[<+->]% or whatever you like for presentation mode
      \onslide<1-| handout:1-2>
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \onslide<1-| handout:2>
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \end{enumerate}
  \end{frame}

  \againframe<0| handout:1>{foo}
  \againframe<0| handout:2>{foo}
\end{document}

slides 5 and 10 for handout

More efficiently with only one repeat:

\documentclass[handout]{beamer}

\begin{document}

  \begin{frame}<1-| handout:1>[label=foo]{My only frame}
    \begin{enumerate}[<+->]% or whatever you like for presentation mode
      \onslide<1-| handout:1-2>
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \onslide<1-| handout:2>
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
      \item Item \arabic{enumi}
    \end{enumerate}
  \end{frame}

  \againframe<0| handout:2>{foo}
\end{document}

I'm not sure how this could apply to article mode since then there are no frames or slides.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to distribute beamer overlayareas in handout mode across multiple frames

The <handout:O> syntax tells beamer to remove something from a slide in the handout version. It can also be used to tell beamer to put things on different slides in the handout version. Thus saying <handout:2> says "make sure that there is a second slide in the handout version and put this on it.". Thus:

\documentclass[handout]{beamer}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\begin{theorem}
     There are infinitely many primes.
\end{theorem}
This has many ramifications:
\begin{overlayarea}{\textwidth}{0.3\textheight}
    \only<2|handout:1>{\begin{corollary}Corollary 1\end{corollary}}
    \only<3|handout:2>{\begin{corollary}Corollary 2\end{corollary}}
    \only<4|handout:3>{\begin{corollary}Corollary 3\end{corollary}}
\end{overlayarea}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

[Tex/LaTex] Frame Numbers in Beamer’s Article Mode

In my opinion, the cleanest approach here is to make \AtBeginSection work in a beamerarticle. The reason why it doesn't is that the \AtBeginSection macro works by defining hooks to be executed at the beginning of theses sections. In article mode, however, the \section macro as defined by the document class is used, so these hooks are never executed.

To overcome this, a redefinition of the \section macro is necessary. This is a bit complicated because it calls \@startsection internally, so simply adding the hook to the end of the macro won't work. Instead, a complete "wrapper" around the original command is necessary:

\mode<article>
\usepackage{xparse}
\makeatletter
\expandafter\let\expandafter\originalsection\expandafter=\csname @orig\string\section\endcsname
\RenewDocumentCommand{\section}{ D<>{} s o m }
{
  \alt<#1>
  {
    \IfBooleanTF {#2}
    {
      \originalsection*{#4}
      %\beamer@atbeginsections % breaks because section* is also used e.g. in the TOC
    }
    {
      \IfNoValueTF {#3} { \originalsection{#4} } { \originalsection[#3]{#4} }
      \beamer@atbeginsection
    }
  }
  {
    \beamer@secgobble
  }
}
\makeatother
\mode<all>

Insert this code into the preamble of your document, after having loaded beamerarticle. What it does is to save the original, beamer-free meaning of the \section macro stored in the macro with the "weird" name @orig\section to \originalsection. Afterwards, \section is redefined to execute the original sectioning command and the hook \beamer@atbeginsection afterwards. As \section has a starred and non-starred version, an optional argument and an (optional) overlay specification, I used xparse which allows you to define such macros in a very convenient way.

Now you can use \AtBeginSection as usual to insert the section start frames. As you probably don't want them to actually show up in article mode, you should use \begin{frame}<article:0> for these (the frame number is still incremented). Additionally, you need to \def\insertsection{} because this command is unknown to beamerarticle and would result in an error otherwise.

Note that using the optional argument of \AtBeginSection to define a hook for starred sections won't work (the line executing it is commented out in the above code). The reason is that \section* is also used for the table of contents etc., where such inserts would result in an error message.

Output of your MWE using the above code

In presentation mode (click on the image to see it full-size):

In article mode:

beamerarticle with the correct frame numbers

For completeness, the full source that produced the above results can be found on pastebin.com.

Edit: The xparse package I used to redefine \section relies on the experimental LaTeX3 kernel. If it is not available, you can use this plain LaTeX2e solution instead:

\mode<article>
\makeatletter
\expandafter\let\expandafter\originalsection\expandafter=\csname @orig\string\section\endcsname
\def\sectionwithhook{\@ifstar\@sectionwithhook\@@sectionwithhook}
\newcommand{\@sectionwithhook}[1]{\originalsection*{#1}}
\newcommand{\@@sectionwithhook}[2][]{\beamer@ifempty{#1}{\originalsection{#2}}{\originalsection[#1]{#2}}\beamer@atbeginsection}
\renewcommand<>{\section}{\alt#1{\sectionwithhook}{\beamer@secgobble}}
\makeatother
\mode<all>

This replaces the whole code given above, achieving the same as the \RenewDocumentCommand with some helper macros.