Telling LaTeX where to compile to from inside your document?

Question

Here is a hypothetical scenario. I want to make a beamer presentation and a handout for that presentation. I start my file as follows:

\newif\ifhandout
\handouttrue
\ifhandout
\PassOptionsToClass{handout}{beamer}
\fi
\documentclass{beamer}

\ifhandout
\usepackage{pgfpages}
\pgfpagesuselayout{4 on 1}[a4paper,landscape,border shrink=5mm]
\fi

Now, what I'd like to add to this conditional-fu is a command that tells LaTeX to compile to handout-\jobname.pdf if the relevant statement is true. Is this sort of thing possible, or can I only do this from the command line?

I've not added the beamer tag because this is not a question about beamer. I couldn't think of any other tags that this might fall under.

Answer 1

Depending on your environment, you could try doing it the other way around: have presentation.tex and presentation-handout.tex, the latter being a symlink to the former, and inspect \jobname to decide. Or have a wrapper file for the handut that does a few \RequirePackages and \AtBeginDocuments, this depends a lot on how much you need.

Answer 2

You can't change the jobname from inside the document. (Ok, you could do some \write18 trickery to compile the document with a different compiler instance...)

The simplest thing to do would to create a wrapper file for the handout:

% handout.tex
\PassOptionsToClass{handout}{beamer}
\input{presenation}

Where presentation.tex is your presentation file. Then you get presentation.pdf and handout.pdf. Note that if you use these commands on the command line the jobname will be the one of the \input file. You would need to use -jobname to change that.