Article mode

[michal-h21]

Are you planning to add support for the ignorenonframetext option from Beamer? This option ignores all text outside the frame environment, except for a few selected commands. It makes it possible to write a source file that contains not only the slides themselves but also explanatory commentary. From that source, we can generate both a presentation and an article using the beamerarticle package. The resulting article can then be distributed as a handout summarizing the talk — and it’s also useful for people who weren’t present at the presentation. For example, here is a handout from my talk at last year's TUG conference.

In this template, you can see how the files are structured. The content of the presentation is kept in a separate file, presentation.tex, and it's included from two different files: one for the slides and one for the handout. The resulting handout then looks like this.

[josephwright]

Short answer: At the moment, the status is 'I'm not decided'.

The main aim of working on ltx-talk is for presentations. In that sense, articles are a parallel question, and have more 'solved' aspects (though not all). There's also the fact that my first steps have been things I use myself, and that means handouts more in the style of frames with extra notes.

At a conceptual level, I'm never really been convinced by Till's idea that you use one source for both a presentation and an article. I see the 'don't repeat yourself' idea but for me this is likely to be problematic with the different ways the two things should be structured. I'm also not sure about the whole beamerarticle approach as an interface.

But I'm not ruling it out: the code is relatively simple to write, and I can see that for some people my view my might not make sense. But there is quite a lot of work first for presentations themselves, so the priority here is bound to be lower.

[michal-h21]

Thanks for the reply. I completely understand that this is a lot of work, so I’m definitely not expecting you to jump on it right away. More just sometime in the future, if and when it makes sense. I just wanted to let you know that this kind of functionality does have its users.

[josephwright]

The plan broadly is to work through the beamer manual and try to split things into

1. Ideas we keep as-is (e..g frame)
2. Ideas we keep conceptually but implement differently (e.g. frame* for fragile frames)
3. Ideas we only keep for compatibility
4. Some explicit compatibility fall-backs that need explicit loading (e.g. frame title arg)
5. Ideas we drop (I'm thinking squeezed frames)

So hopefully in the end everything will be picked off and if we don't keep it, we'll have a reason.

[samcarter]

Instead of ignoring everything outside of frames, you could wrap all the non-presentation content in an environment and then use something like the comments package to quickly toggle the environment on/off.

[josephwright]

Not sure that would be any clearer: still feels like an odd document structure.

[michal-h21]

That's not a bad idea, thanks.

[cfr42]

Just to note that the UK TUG workshop slides used article for the notes and so do their descendants.

However, that is the only project I've ever used this structure for, personally. It does work quite nicely in that case where you want exercises around the slides, sometimes with longer code excerpts.