[texhax] beamer and pgfpages

[Steve Schwartz]

Tom,

On Fri, 2007-01-19 at 09:38 +0100, Tom Backer Johnsen wrote:
> However, I have problems with handouts.  One of the nice things with 
> PowerPoint is that you can print out up to 6 pictures of the slides
> on 
> the same (A4) page. 

I suspect you're looking for pdfpages, not pgfpages. I don't use it but
a quick glance at the documentation led me quickly to the following
document which probably does what you want:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}

\begin{document}

\includepdf[nup=2x3,delta=40mm
10mm,frame,landscape,pages=-,scale=0.9]{<presentation file.pdf>}

\end{document}

You don't really need to do it this way, as any printer option to put
multiple pages on a page will work. Depending on your system, you'll
find these in the print dialogs, printer setups, etc. However, as beamer
generates pages that are physically small, you need to expand them to an
appropriate size before/when you pass them to the multiple-page print
filter.

Here's an alias to a sequence of commands that I use on my linux system
to put 4 slides to a page:

alias beamer4up 'pdftops -paper match \!* - | psnup -4 -W126mm -H96mm
-b0.5cm -pa4  | ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 - \!*"4up.pdf"'

with some explanation:

1) as I use pdflatex to generate presentations, pdftops converts it to a
ps file to I can then use psnup. The -paper match option ensures that
the ps file retains the same page size as the pdf file. I use pdftops
instead of pdf2ps as I have found that it handles fonts better.

2) psnup does the work of putting multiple pages on a page (in the above
alias 4 but you can put any whole number here),  specifies the input
page size WxH, adds a border around each slide, and puts the whole thing
out on a4 paper.

3) ps2pdf then converts it back to a pdf, which is named
file.pdf4up.pdf.

The professional script-writers will easily deduce from the above that
I'm not one of them, but this works well for me. I got the basic bits
from somewhere in the beamer documentation, and the rest by trial and
error.

HTH.

Steve



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