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In Beamer, is it possible to switch between handout mode and presentation mode in the middle of a presentation?

The reason I want to do this is that I am working through a slide deck in multiple lectures. I want to omit the pauses for slides from previous lectures to support quickly navigating to them for reference (handout mode), while for the current lecture I would like to include the pauses for presentation purposes (presentation mode).

Here's a minimal example:

\documentclass[pdftex,handout]{beamer}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}{Frame 1}
Step 1 \pause Step 2 \pause Step 3
\end{frame}

% I want to switch to presentation mode here!

\begin{frame}{Frame 2}
Step 4 \pause Step 5 \pause Step 6
\end{frame}

\end{document}

After compiling, I would like to have four slides. One slide showing the entire Frame 1, and three slides showing the three stages of Frame 2.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
10

beamer holds the selected mode in the macro \beamer@currentmode so what you need to do is change that mid-way through your document.

\documentclass[pdftex,handout]{beamer}
%\url{http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/91691/86}

\makeatletter
\newcommand\changemode[1]{%
  \gdef\beamer@currentmode{#1}}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}{Frame 1}
Step 1 \pause Step 2 \pause Step 3
\end{frame}

% I want to switch to presentation mode here!
\changemode{beamer}

\begin{frame}{Frame 2}
Step 4 \pause Step 5 \pause Step 6
\end{frame}

\end{document}

Of course, there may be things "under the bonnet" which depend on the mode during initialisation so it might be that you want to start in beamer mode, switch to handout (or maybe trans) at the start of the slides, then back to beamer for the slides for the current lecture.

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  • Thank you! I assumed there was a macro that stored this setting, but I couldn't find it in the documentation or with a google search. As you recommended, I begin in beamer mode, switch to handout mode at the beginning, then switch back to beamer mode midway through the presentation. It seems to work perfectly.
    – walkie
    Jan 14, 2013 at 19:49
  • 1
    @walkie I did a grep through the code and couldn't find such a macro. I guess it's one of those "here be dragons" in that things could go wrong if you weren't careful.
    – Andrew Stacey
    Jan 14, 2013 at 20:19
  • 1
    Just a note: setting the macro apparently does only work after \begin{document} (please don't ask why I need to change it within the header but after the document class :)
    – stefanct
    Nov 10, 2015 at 21:05
  • Doesn't seem to work the second time, only the first...
    – Metomorphose
    Jan 17 at 17:12

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