Beamer handouts, pgfpages, no love

[James Harkins <jamshark70@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Today I was playing around with exporting a beamer presentation for handouts, following the advice online to use pgfpages for saving dead trees. I'm not sure if it's an org problem or a LaTeX problem.

Exporting to a presentation is no problem:

#+startup: beamer
#+LaTeX_CLASS: beamer
#+LaTeX_CLASS_OPTIONS: [presentation]
#+BEAMER_THEME: default

For handouts, I tried changing it like this:

#+startup: beamer
#+LaTeX_CLASS: beamer
#+LaTeX_CLASS_OPTIONS: [handout]
#+BEAMER_THEME: default
#+LATEX_HEADER: \usepackage{pgfpages}
#+LATEX_HEADER: \pgfpagesuselayout{2 on 1}[a4paper,border shrink=5mm]

One problem: if I use any :BMCOL: tags, I get strange errors like this:

! LaTeX Error: \begin{minipage} on input line 117 ended by \end{altenv}.

... where the entity that is \ended could be several different things.

So I tried :noexport:ing all the sections that have columns, and now the export completes without fatal errors, but pgfpages then ends up making each frame about twice as large, instead of half. As far as I can see, it is actually trying to put two slides on each page (I can see only every other one), but each frame is so much larger than it's supposed to be that I can only see part of one of the two.

I'm using xelatex, if that makes any difference.

I could find list messages from about a year ago where somebody was successfully using pgfpages. I have no idea why it was working for him but not for me. His latex_header stuff was pretty similar to what I have above.

Thanks,
hjh

PS Belated thanks to Nick for answering the question of mine about emphasis markup and footnote tags. I haven't had a chance to try yet, but I did see the reply.