standalone & beamer, preview and crop

Question

Following up on Using beamer tools in tikz, without creating slides:

The combination of standalone and beamer via preview option would be great if it did work, but even this simple example (from standalone manual) does produce just a one-page PDF, instead of the two pages I'd expect.

\documentclass[beamer,preview]{standalone}
\begin{document}
\begin{standaloneframe}[] 
\only<1>{ One }
\only<2>{ Two }
\end{standaloneframe}
\end{document}

Without preview, it delivers the expected two pages, but non-cropped, of course.

And crop instead of preview results in ! Improper \prevdepth. \newpage ...everypar {}\fi \par \ifdim \prevdepth as reported in other questions.

This would be really nice to get working reliably.

Answer 1

You could use pdfcrop to crop the pages. Either manually run

pdfcrop filename.pdf

after the compilation or trick standalone into running it for you (needs shell-escape enabled):

% !TeX program = txs:///arara
% arara: pdflatex: {synctex: on, interaction: nonstopmode, shell: yes}
\documentclass[beamer,convert={command=\unexpanded{{/usr/local/texlive/2023/bin/universal-darwin/pdfcrop\space \infile}}}]{standalone}
\begin{document}
\begin{standaloneframe}[] 
\only<1>{ One one }
\only<2>{ Two }
\end{standaloneframe}
\end{document}