This should in principle be possible by not employing the pgfpages
package that ships with beamer
, but the more generic (1) pdfpages
package (note the pdf vs pgf in the package name) in conjuction with (2) pax
. From the pdfpages
documentation:
Links and other interactive features of PDF documents When including pages of a PDF only the so called content stream of these pages is copied but no links. Up to now there are no TeX-engines (pdfTeX, XeTeX, ...) available that can copy links or other interactive features of a PDF document, too. Thus, all kinds of links1 will get lost during inclusion. (Using \includepdf
, \includegraphics
, or other low-level commands.)
However, there’s a gleam of hope. Some links may be extracted and later reinserted by a package called pax which can be downloaded from CTAN. Have a look at it!
pax
is a combination of a Java tool to extract link information from the PDF you intend to embed and a package that reads in this information to restore the links into embedded PDF. It is still considered as experimental and I have not tried it. However, it is written by Heiko Oberdiek, so I would be optimistic that it works.
Basically, your process would be as follows:
- Generate the handout in 1x1 format, that is, without any
pgfpages
processing.
- Run the
pax
tool on the resulting PDF.
- Write an additional .tex-file that employs
pdfpages
to generate the 2x1 or 2x2 handout format from the 1x1 PDF and loads the pax
package for link restoring.
- Let us know, if it works :-)