Is there a nice solution to get a "presenter mode" for Latex presentations?

I think pympress comes somewhat close to what you want. As it is written in python, I'd assume that you can run it on any platform -- I know it works under Linux.

If you want to display notes, use the following to display them on the right:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{pgfpages}
\setbeamertemplate{note page}[plain]
\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}{test}
hello
\note{say "hello" now}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

and then pympress will render only the left or the right half of the pdf in the different windows.


On the mac, you can go with osx-presentation. (full disclaimer: i am the author).

Workflow:

  1. Prepare your beamer tex file.

  2. Within a frame, add presentation notes using the package pdfcomment. For example, \marginnote{\pdfcomment[icon=note]{Your notes goes here.}}.

  3. Compile the beamer tex file with pdfcomment package global option draft (\usepackage[draft]{pdfcomment}) to include the notes (pdf comments). If you want to have a version without notes, compile with pdfcomment global option final. Check the documentation of pdfcomment for more details, https://ctan.org/pkg/pdfcomment/.

  4. Open the beamer pdf file with osx-presentation. Two windows will show up. One is for presentation view, and the other is for audience.

  5. Drag the audience window to the screen that you want to show the slides. Maximize the audience window to full screen. Here, you need to have separate windows for your computer and the external screen. This can be set in the preference of your operating system.

  6. Give the talk using the presentation view.

Screenshot:

enter image description here

Selected features:

  • Synchronize your mouse cursor in the presentation view and audience view.

  • You can draw with your mouse and erase with keyboard shortcut e.

Comparing to other solutions:

  • Advantages:

    • Nicer presentation view comparing to splitshow and Skim.
    • Easy to setup on MacOS comparing to pympress. .dmg Installer available. Less dependencies.
    • No conversion from PDF to other format.

  • Disadvantages:

    • Cannot use beamer built-in \note{} to keep note. Need to use pdfcomment.
    • Notes are not well wrapped. You either need to use \textCF to change line or tweak the Python script for auto-wrapping the notes. For an attempt to tweak the Python script, check https://bitbucket.org/rndblnch/osx-presentation/pull-requests/8 .
    • Hard to generate PDF with nicely formatted notes.
    • Only works for MacOS.

from the website:

Présentation.app main feature is its presenter view on the main display that shows the current and next slides, and its main view on the secondary display (if present) that shows the current slide. It also has some more or less original features:

  • a clock that displays the current time or a (countdown) timer;
  • the content of PDF notes are displayed below the current slide;
  • navigation links inside the PDF do work;
  • external links can be followed, and the main view then toggles to a full screen web view or a video view if the links leads to a video on the local file system;
  • the app is in fact a python script that can be used from the command line.

Demo tex file:

\documentclass[12pt, t]{beamer}

% draft will print out comment
% final will hide all comment
\usepackage[draft]{pdfcomment}
\newcommand{\pdfnote}[1]{\marginnote{\pdfcomment[icon=note]{#1}}}

\usetheme{default}
\title{Demo of osx-presentation}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\begin{frame}{Demo of notes}
This is the content of slide. 
\pdfnote{My presentation notes. }
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}{Another slide to show the next slide feature}
\end{frame}

\end{document}

Another Mac-specific (well, not really OS-independent) solution is implemented by the Skim PDF viewer, which provides an option to display a second PDF file inside another Window page-synchronously with the first one. This comes quite handy to show beamer notes on a second screen (regardless of its dimensions and layout).

One prerequisite for this to work is, however, that your notes.pdf actually has the same number of pages than slides.pdf. With beamer this can be somewhat tricky to achieve, as beamer ships out a notes page only for slides that actually do have notes and only once for frames that use allowframebreaks. I had asked about a solution to this problem in this question, the answer given by Ulrich Schwarz solves it nicely.

Tags:

Beamer

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