Add speaker notes to beamer presentations using RMarkdown

Question

I want to create a beamer pdf presentation from a RMarkdown file. I would like to add speaker notes to some slides and set options for these notes (to be printed or not when you print the presentation).

These speaker notes typically show on the speaker's computer when he is presenting on a screen but never show on the slides.

Is that possible? How can I do that?

Answer 1

Possible workaround, but unfortunately not purely markdown

Adapted from DanielEWeeks's GitHub.

01. Add the following to the YAML section

header-includes:
  - \setbeameroption{show notes}   

02. and add notes as

## This is a slide

this is (markdown) text in slide

\note{
this is a note (does not understand markdown and
and wont work in other outputs formats (such 
as ioslides or Slidy
}

## Next Slide

Notes will look like:

03. you would then have to knit the document twice, changing the YAML header-includes to

header-includes:
  - \setbeameroption{hide notes}   

in order to create the pdf without notes.

By default, Rmarkdown will overwrite the previously created document, so you might need to:

1. create notes pdf-document.
2. change name of notes pdf-document.
3. change YAML section.
4. create presentation pdf-document.

Hopefully there is a better way that I don't know about.