making 3-up handouts from beamer presentations

I use the latex package ‘beamer’ (with lyx) to create presentations for various talks etc.

For a forthcoming conference I was asked by the organisers to create a 3-up pdf file similar to what Powerpoint users produce.

I struggled with pgfpages for a while, and even contemplated writing my own pgfpages layout. However, common sense prevailed and I found the pfjam package.

So, once my presentation is ready,in the lyx preamble I add the ‘handout’ option to the class options in “Document/Settings/Document Class” so it reads: 12pt, handout

Then in the Latex Preamble I add:

\usecolortheme{dove}

and remove any ‘\setbeamertemplates’ which may conflict with a nice plain layout.

I then export this as a pdf file with File/Export/PDF (pdflatex)

Open this in acrobat and it *should* be 1 slide per page.

To convert this to 3 slides per page, with a frame around each slide, and the slides shifted to the left of the page (leaving the RHS of the page for people to write notes/comments) use this pdfjam command:

pdfnup presentation.pdf –nup 1×3 –delta “0.5cm 1.5cm” –frame true –offset “-4.0cm 0″ –scale 0.80

Easy!