Beamer animation misplaced in handout mode

Question

While making slides for presentation involving animateinline environment from animate package, all slides are fine as expected in normal/presentation node, as shown below:

But I came across a problem when converting the slides into handout. As you can see in the output below, the animation is not in the correct place. (System: WinEdt on Windows Vista)

Any suggestions? Did I miss something in the process?

MWE Code

\documentclass[12pt,handout]{beamer} 
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{animate,pgfpages}
\usetheme[secheader]{Boadilla}
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
\setbeamerfont*{frametitle}{size=\normalsize,series=\bfseries}
%\pgfpagesuselayout{4 on 1}[a4paper,border shrink=5mm]  % activate this line to show handout mode.


\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\begin{columns}
\column{0.45\columnwidth}

Some text here on the left and an animation on the right for beamer presentation. The result is as expected.
However, when handout mode is used for 4 on 1 handout, then the animation does not stay on the right, but somewhere else.

\column{0.45\columnwidth}
\begin{animateinline}[poster=first,controls]{8}%
  \multiframe{10}{rt=0+.1,icount=0+1}
   {\fbox{\parbox{\columnwidth}{an animation shows here}}
   }
\end{animateinline}

\end{columns}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Answer 1

The implementation of animate uses PDF-Annotations, very much as hyperref does for all sorts of hyperlinks.

PDF Annotations don't get scaled properly while producing multiple-frames-per-page handouts using the pgfpages sub-package.

From the PGF-3.0.0 Manual, §85:

A word of warning: using pgfpages will destroy hyperlinks. Actually, the hyperlinks are not destroyed, only they will appear at totally wrong positions on the final output. This is due to a fundamental flaw in the pdf specification: In pdf the bounding rectangle of a hyperlink is given in "absolute page coordinates" and translations or rotations do not affect them. Thus, the transformations applied by pgfpages to put the pages where you want them are (cannot, even) be applied to the coordinates of hyperlinks. It is unlikely that this will change in the foreseeable future.

This is why beamer disables the navigation symbols by default, while in handout mode.

Here is an extended example with an ordinary internal hyperlink on the second frame. The link rectangle is malpositioned in the handout:

\documentclass[12pt,handout]{beamer}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{animate,pgfpages}

\usetheme[secheader]{Boadilla}
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
\setbeamerfont*{frametitle}{size=\normalsize,series=\bfseries}
\pgfpagesuselayout{2 on 1}[a4paper,border shrink=5mm]
\hypersetup{colorlinks=false,pdfborder=0 0 2,linkbordercolor=0 0 1}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}\label{previous}
\begin{columns}
\column{0.45\columnwidth}

Some text here on the left and an animation on the right for beamer presentation. The result is as expected.
However, when handout mode is used for 4 on 1 handout, then the animation does not stay on the right, but somewhere else.

\column{0.45\columnwidth}
\begin{animateinline}[poster=first,controls]{8}%
  \multiframe{10}{rt=0+.1,icount=0+1}
   {\fbox{\parbox{\columnwidth}{an animation shows here}}
   }
\end{animateinline}

\end{columns}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
  Here should follow a link to the previous frame: \ref{previous}
\end{frame}
\end{document}