Re: [Orgmode] Beamer support in Org-mode

[Eric S Fraga]

At Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:17:21 +0100,
Carsten Dominik wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> this is in response to the discussions about beamer
> export from Org-mode.  Yesterday I had a long train ride
> during which I scanned the beamer documentation (smoking
> hot stuff!).  Then I made the attached draft
> for Org-mode support, strongly based on the stuff
> Eric Fraga has put together recently.  What is described
> below sort-of works in some experimental code here, but before
> I polish I would like comments on this outline.

Wow!  This is great Carsten.  

As you know, I have spent the past week preparing a set of lectures
for one of my courses completely in org mode using beamer.  I finished
them today (100 or so slides) and the way I set it up is working quite
well for me.  Mind you, you've added a few features that will
definitely come in useful and I am going to retrofit back into this
set of slides when your update is available.

I do like the whole setup you've defined but I have a couple of comments:

> 1.3 Columns
> ============
> Headlines one below frames (level 3 by default) can be used start
> columns on a frame.  The presence of such a headline without a
> beamer tag (see below) will create the columns environment.  The
> text in the headline is ignored.  It is helpful to write
> "columns" in this headline anyway.

I've modified *my* interpretation of level 3 headings to take the text
given on this heading as the option to the columns environment so
that, for instance,

,----
| * section
| ** a slide
| *** [t]
| **** 0.4
|      - one column
| **** 0.6
|      - another slightly wider column
`----

will generate

  ...
  \begin{columns}[t]  % note the [t]
  ...

as I found this necessary sometimes.  Although this looks a little
ugly, I am not sure if there is a better way of passing these types of
options to the columns environment?

> 1.4 A column
> =============
> Headlines below a columns environment (level 4 by default) open a
> column.  The text in the headline should be a number smaller than
> one and will be used to define the column width.

You may wish to make it clear that this will be relative to \textwidth
as currently defined at that point.

> 1.5 Block-like environments
> ============================
> Any headline can become a block-like environment by tagging it
> with a beamer tag.  For examples, `:B_block:' will trigger the
> creation of a block environment, while `:B_theorem:' will trigger
> the creation of a theorem environment.  When it makes sense, the
> headline text is used in an appropriate argument of the
> environment, if that does not make sense, it is ignored.

This is really nice!  As you know, I was using level 5 for blocks
which meant that they had to be in columns (although obviously I could
have one column of full width).  This is much less clumsy than my
approach. 

One last thing: would you like to mention support for \alert{} or does
this belong elsewhere?

Thanks again,
eric