When you accompany beamer slides with notes (using the \note{...} command) and you make them shown (using \setbeameroption{show notes}) you gain extra note pages like this:

When printing note pages alone, the header and preview makes sense. In my case with both slides and notes, it doesn't. What I want is note pages that...

• contain no header, no preview, no date (which also increases space for note content)
• do not increment page numbers
• have proper spacing between paragraphs

To put that into an image, I want this:

To get there I came up with the following. First, to get rid of the header and preview I re-write the note page beamer template:

\setbeamertemplate{note page}{%
  \insertnote%
}

If you want to stay closer to the original, you can copy from the default code of that template, located at /usr/share/texmf- site/tex/latex/beamer/base/themes/outer/beamerouterthemedefault.sty in Gentoo Linux:

\defbeamertemplate*{note page}{default}
{%
  [..]
  \vskip.25em
  \nointerlineskip
  \insertnote
}

Second, to fix page numbers and spacing I wrote a wrapper around the \note{...} command using \renewcommand{\note}[1]{...}:

\newlength{\parskipbackup}
\setlength{\parskipbackup}{\parskip}
\newlength{\parindentbackup}
\setlength{\parindentbackup}{\parindent}

\let\notebackup\note
\renewcommand{\note}[1]{\notebackup{%
  \mode<handout>{\addtocounter{page}{-1}}%
  \setlength{\parindent}{0ex}%
  \setlength{\parskip}{10pt}%
  \noindent%
  {\normalsize{}#1}%
  \setlength{\parskip}{\parskipbackup}%
  \setlength{\parindent}{\parindentbackup}%
}%
}

If you have used \renewcommand before, this code should explain itself. If not, please drop me a mail. If you have ideas on improving above-mentioned approach, I'd be interested to hear from you, too. The sources of the presentation are available here:

• .tar.gz download
• Gitweb