Changing the textwidth of the notes in Beamer (LaTeX)

Question

I've been using the beamer class to create presentations in LaTeX and I love it. Recently I started using the \note command to add notes to my handout so that I have a printed version with some pointers to remind myself of things I want to say in the lecture.
I have a problem with the longer lines in the notes environment as they seems to spill of the right end of the page without formatting correctly. I don't know if this is so for a reason, but in any case, I would like to find out how to change it. Clearly, I do not want to change the width of the text everywhere, only in the note environment.

Here is a minimal example:

\documentclass[beamer]{beamer}
\title{An example of itemize in notes not working in beamer}
\usetheme{Boadilla}
\setbeameroption{show notes}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
$$  e^{i\pi}+1=0$$
\end{frame}
\note[itemize]{
\item At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blandiis pra
}
\end{document}

Without the [itemize] option it works fine, but if you put a \begin{itemize}...\end{itemize} environment manually the result is the same.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

I finally found a good answer, by re-posting on TeX.SE. It turns out that there's a small bug in Beamer that is responsible for this behavior. A workaround is given in the TeX.SE site. Hopefully, the workaround or a real fix will be included in the next Beamer release, as is currently planned.

Cheers.

Answer 2

I had the same problem, so I created a command in the preamble which defined a new style for my note page, and I also changed the template of the notes a bit. This is what I have (just before the \begin{document}:

\usepackage{setspace}
\usetemplatenote{\setlength{\leftmargin}{1cm} \beamertemplatefootempty \insertnote}

\newcommand{\notepage}[1]{\note{\setlength{\parskip}{0.7em} \setlength{\parindent}{0.4em} \scriptsize #1 }}

So instead of using \note in the document, I call \notepage, and the note will be formatted the way I defined before. Try this formatting and if you don't like you can change the values of the margins, indentation and skip between paragraphs to suit your needs.

By the way, I don't understand why you are using

\documentclass[beamer]{beamer}
\setbeameroption{show notes}

The way I do it is to have the three options and comment/uncomment according to what I need:

%\documentclass[notes]{beamer}
%\documentclass[notes=hide]{beamer}
\documentclass[notes=only]{beamer}

Answer 3

Try changing the theme before going to more drastic measures.

I noticed that changing the theme from Boadilla to something else, or deleting the reference to a theme altogether, solved the problem. FWIW, the two themes I used to test this were Warsaw and Berlin.

I found the above to be true for the following versions of Beamer: 3.07-2 and 3.10-2.