Columns in beamerarticle

[samcarter]

Currently beamer has the following to say about columns in article mode:

beamer/base/beamerbaseframecomponents.sty

Lines 233 to 238 in 88fd157

	\mode
	<article>
	{
	% do sth. more intelligent in the future
	\newenvironment<>{columns}[1][]{}{}
	}

... so maybe there is room to make this feature more useful? I was wondering if it wouldn't be useful to add an option to the beamerarticle package for which columns would behave like columns?

Just a quick proof of concept (optional arguments for alignment still need to be added):

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{beamerarticle}

\makeatletter
\mode<article>{\renewenvironment<>{beamer@columnenv}[2][]{ \begin{minipage}{#2}}{\end{minipage}}
\let\endcolumn\endbeamer@columnenv}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\begin{columns}
\begin{column}{.6\textwidth}
content...
\end{column}%
\begin{column}{.4\textwidth}
content...
\end{column}%
\end{columns}

\end{document}