Use beamer in article mode with hyperref

Question

I want to create an article version of a beamer document.

The following MWE stops with error ! LaTeX Error: \beamer@descriptionitem undefined.:

\documentclass[class=scrartcl]{beamer}
\usepackage{beamerbasearticle}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
Content
\end{frame}
\end{document}

I use beamer.cls 2013/01/04 3.26 and hyperref.sty 2012/11/06 v6.83m (Actual TeXlive 2012)

If I remove hyperref everything works fine, but I need hyperref (my document contains hyperref-commands like \href).

The sequence of loading the packages makes no difference, also \documentclass[class=article, hyperref]{beamer} does not work.

Any hints what I can do?

Edit: In meantime I found a fix for me: When I replace hyperref with nohyperref the document is created without error. But it's not a real solution, with nohyperref I get no active links.

Answer 1

According to the beamer ChangeLog dated 2004-09-23, Version 2.99:

Option class=xxxx [is] obsolete. Use document class xxxx directly instead and load new style [package] beamerarticle.

Hence, you should use the following instead of the class= option and the beamerbasearticle package (note that the word base is not present in the replacement package name):

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{beamerarticle}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
Content
\end{frame}
\end{document}

When using this approach, things should work as expected without conflicts etc.

Further info

There are no examples using the deprecated syntax in the beamer repository, except for some commented code in beamerexample-prosper.tex (at least I couldn't find anything else relevant when using grep).

The code in beamer which handles this option is in beamerbasemodes.sty (and it is quite a pain to trace some of the option handling in beamer...), and is preceeded by the following comment:

%
% Check whether we should initiate transfer to another class (obsolete)
%