The speakernotes extension: handle your speaker notes when producing handouts of slideshows

[pagiraud]

Description

Hi,

I’ve written a little extension / Lua filter to handle speaker notes when producing handouts of slideshows.

I wanted to provide handouts to my students in the spirit of the beamerarticle package: that is a handout that looks like a paper or a report, not like a slideshow. But thanks to a discussion I started in the Pandoc forum, I understood it wouldn’t be straightforward.

Thus, I decided to create this extension that covers a variety of output formats, although I will myself only use PDF.

Here’s an excerpt from the readme:

This Pandoc filter / Quarto extension helps dealing with 'notes' containers used in presentations (Beamer, RevealJS or PowerPoint) when used in another format that won’t recognize it (ex : PDF, HTML). The default behavior of this filter is to remove the content of 'notes' containers (works with all format) but it can be used to display them in a framed box (for now, PDF and HTML only) or use arbitrary formatting (for now, PDF, HTML, ODT and DOCX only).

Rationale

Writing a presentation in Markdown for Pandoc or Quarto is very convenient. It is, for instance, very easy to add some speaker notes by adding a div with notes as a class name in a slide:

## Some slide title

Some slide content

::: notes
Some notes for the speaker
:::

Nevertheless, a problem occurs when using this code and exporting in other formats: the notes class is ignored and the notes are displayed like any other content, with no way for the reader to identify them.

I hope this extension will be useful to some of you!