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a handy feature of beamer is to be able to produce slides or a handout. you "just" have to change a line in the source. a known solution is to use 2 different files forthe different options with a common input to the slides, but find this solution non economic.

however, I wished to produce the slides and the handout more naturally using a Makefile.

Is it possible to pass at the command line (for instance to lualatex) an option that can be used by beamer and include that in a Makefile?

meduz
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  • FWIW, in ConTeXt conditional processing is handled using modes, and context has a command line option to enable or disable modes. – Aditya Apr 09 '14 at 17:08
  • I found a related question: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1492/passing-parameters-to-a-document – meduz Apr 14 '14 at 08:35

2 Answers2

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You can execute it like that:

pdflatex  '\PassOptionsToClass{handout}{beamer} \input{presentation}'

This will still create presentation.pdf and overwrite the normal version of the PDF.

Or alternatively you can use three files and create the following documents:

% notes.tex
\PassOptionsToClass{notes=only}{beamer}
\input{presentation}

% handout.tex
\PassOptionsToClass{handout}{beamer}
\input{presentation}

which will create notes.pdf and handout.pdf instead without any need for a compiler options.

The main file can now easily be compiled simply using pdflatex presentation and the notes and handout with pdflatex notes and pdflatex handout, respectively.

Tahtisilma
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My solution to this is to use sed. I'm not great with Regualr Expressions but here's the basic command to do it.

sed "s/documentclass[[?][a-zA-Z0-9,]*[]?]/documentclass[handout]/g" main.tex > handout.tex

This will create a second file. I know there is a way to store the options it finds and keep them in. It's not that complicated but I haven't taken the time to do it (another problem for another day).

Anyway, I then string the sed command with the lualatex commands for both the presentation and the handouts like so:

sed "s/documentclass[[?][a-zA-Z0-9,]*[]?]/documentclass[handout]/g" main.tex > handout.tex && lualatex --jobname=Presentation --synctex=1 --output-directory=Presentation main.tex && lualatex --jobname=Handout --synctex=1 --output-directory=Handout handout.tex

This could obviously be done as three separate commands.

bteres
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