Can I use beamer without setting \documentclass to beamer?

Question

I want to have a PDF that is the normal type: \documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{article} with normal TeX tables, graphs and words, but I want it such that there's beamer slides scattered throughout of the form \documentclass[handout]{beamer} with \usepackage{beamerthemesplit}.

Is this possible? I haven't been able to get beamer to work without setting \documentclass to beamer.

Answer 1

You can use pdfpages package for that. I've produced a dummy beamer document as follows.

\documentclass[handout]{beamer}
\usetheme{split}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}{1st frame}
    Some content
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}{2nd frame}
    Some content
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}{3rd frame}
    Some content
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Then naming this file as myhandout.pdf, I have the following code run for the collating documents.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{lipsum}   %For dummy text
\author{The author}
\title{The title}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\lipsum[1-5]
\includepdf[pages={2,3},fitpaper=true]{myhandout.pdf}
\lipsum[4-6]
\includepdf[pages={1}]{myhandout.pdf}
\end{document}

Notice the effect of the fitpaper option in the last page.

Answer 2

Beamer manual (in section 21.2.3 Including Slides from the Presentation Version in the Article Version) explains how to include slides in beamerarticle. You need three files

1.- A file which contains all your text (for article and slides). I've called it Beamer.tex. The slides which will be shown in article mode are labelled with [label=somelabel]. You can use somelabel to include them with command \includeslide.

\mode<article>
{
  \usepackage{fullpage}
  \usepackage{pgf}
  \usepackage{hyperref}
  \setjobnamebeamerversion{MainBeamer}
}

\mode<presentation>
{
  \usetheme{split}
}

\begin{document}

\section{The first section}

This is the article text with to figures corresponding to slides.

\begin{figure}[ht]
  \begin{center}
    \includeslide[width=5cm]{frame1}
  \end{center}
  \caption{The first slide.}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[ht]
  \begin{center}
    \includeslide[width=5cm]{frame2}
  \end{center}
  \caption{The second slide.}
\end{figure}

\frame[label=frame1]{
  \frametitle{This is the first frame}

  \begin{itemize}
  \item The first item$\dots$
  \item $\dots$ and the second one.
  \end{itemize}
}

\frame[label=frame2]{
  \frametitle{This is the second frame}

  \begin{itemize}
  \item The first item$\dots$
  \item $\dots$ and the second one.
  \end{itemize}
}

\end{document}

2.- A second file (MainBeamer.tex) which will produce the slides. The name of this file without the extension is what is included in command \setjobnamebeamerversion{MainBeamer} in previous file.

\documentclass[ignorenonframetext]{beamer}    
\input{Beamer.tex}

3.- A a third file (ArticleBeamer.tex) which will produce the article version.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{beamerarticle}
\input{Beamer.tex}

Now you process second file and once you have MainBeamer.pdf you can process third file and obtain: