LaTeX beamer handouts (with frames and borders)

January 29, 2013

I’m working on some notes for a beginners LaTeX course that I’m giving for the University Graduate College this week. In a temporary fit of insanity I decided it would be nice to write all the slides in LaTeX, so that I can distribute the source to the students so they get some real world LaTeX examples to go along with the course notes.

I was attempting to make handouts for the students using the great handoutWithNotes package. However, as my slides are white, they looked a bit odd on a page without a frame around them:

I wanted to add a border to make the handouts look better, but there were no suggestions at the site I got the package from as to how to add a frame, and I’m too lazy to go digging in CTAN to see if there’s any documentation.

Instead, a little bit of googling (thank you tex.stackexchange!) revealed the answer:

\pgfpageslogicalpageoptions{1}{border code=\pgfusepath{stroke}}
\pgfpageslogicalpageoptions{2}{border code=\pgfusepath{stroke}}
\pgfpageslogicalpageoptions{3}{border code=\pgfusepath{stroke}}

You’ll need one command for each slide on a page, and you get simple frames around the slides:

Easy!


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