Is there a nice way to compile a beamer presentation without the pauses?

Say I made a beamer presentation and I want to print it out. Is there a nice way to make beamer ignore the pauses so that I don't get lots of pages with duplicate information? Of course there are some things one could do with find & replace, but I would prefer a more sophisticated solution if such exists.

6 Answers 6

Use the handout mode:

\documentclass[handout]

It collapses each frame to one page. Sometimes its method of collapsing needs a little fine-tuning, but it's generally okay. For more on that fine-tuning, read about mode-specific instructions in the beamer user guide. As lockstep says, it also sets up some other defaults such as removing the navigation symbols (which, after all, don't make sense on a handout version). All of these changes are customisable.

The sections to read in the beamer user guide are in Part IV (Creating Supporting Material), in particular section 21 (Creating Handouts and Lecture Notes). Section 21.3 has the details on how to achieve the fine-tuning using mode specifications.

Mikael included this link to a version of this question on MathOverflow. As I answered that question, and I think that it's good to keep TeX-related stuff here rather than there, I'm copying my answer to that question below, with very minor modification, which deals with variants of the basic answer.

1. Print it 4-up using the pgfpages package (from the pgf/TikZ meta-package). If you want to distinguish the pages, don't change the background colour (waste of ink), rather use pgfpages to put a border around each frame (this isn't one of the standard page-type declarations, but it isn't hard and I can make mine available if anyone wants it).
2. It's possible to change the type of the output (between beamer, handout, trans, or article) without modifying the file. The trick is to put the main document in one file, say geometry.tex but without the documentclass declaration. Then you create a new file for each type with just the documentclass declaration. For example, geometry.beamer.tex could contain:

\documentclass[12pt,t,xcolor=dvipsnames,ignorenonframetext] \input

\documentclass[12pt,xcolor=dvipsname,ignorenonframetext,handout,% notes=only% ] \input

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt] \usepackage[envcountsect] \setjobnamebeamerversion \input