Columns in beamerarticle

[samcarter]

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

https://github.com/josephwright/beamer/blob/88fd1574ae12583a09d924b10f0d2dd0573923ad/base/beamerbaseframecomponents.sty#L233-L238

... 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}

[khanson679]

This is really nice. I would also like to see missing functionality such as this implemented for beamerarticle by default.

One problem with the above: it does not seem to work with the \column command, only a proper pair of \begin{column} and \end{column}.