[tex-live] Landscape bug in LaTeX Beamer class from TeXLive 2008

John Murdie john at cs.york.ac.uk
Thu Mar 26 17:07:44 CET 2009


On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 10:27 +0100, Lars Madsen wrote:
> beamer uses a non stadard paper format, and for some reason dvips have 
> been changed a bit in TL2008
> 
> try
> 
> dvips -t unknown file.dvi
> 
> BTW: isn't beamer already typesetting things in landscape by default?

Thanks for the reply, Lars.  That fixes the problem - though the
solution seems to me to be very obscure! I'd searched this list for
'landscape' thinking I had an instance of the general problem that the
Imperial College webpage reports, but had not searched for 'Beamer'
here. I've read the previous postings here on this matter and, though I
have a solution, am not really any wiser!

Yes, Beamer sets slides in landscape format by default. The default
size, however, is 5.04" wide x 3.78" high. This from the 'Properties'
information box of Acrobat Reader when I typeset the (unaltered) Beamer
example shown on the laTeX Beamer class homepage:
http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/

The end-user wished to print the slides with one to a page of landscape
A4 paper. Following the Beamer manual, chapter 21 section 1, page 190, I
added the class option 'handout' and put the following commands after
the /documentclass command:

\usepackage{pgfpages}
\pgfpagesuselayout{resize to}[a4paper,border shrink=5mm,landscape]

and then pdflatex)(1)-ed the document. The resulting PDF file is
correct: A4 landscape, the right way up, correctly centred
left-to-right. The 'landscape' option to \pgfpagesuselayout is necessary
otherwise the resulting PDF will be A4 portrait.

When I did the same with latex(1) and 'dvips' by itself or 'dvips -t
landscape', the resulting PostScript document was A4 landscape upside
down, centred left to right. In the former case dvips wrote the warning
message: 'dvips: both landscape and papersize specified:  ignoring
landscape'.

John A. Murdie




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