Is there a specialized Pdf viewer for Latex-Beamer presentations on Linux?

Question

Most of the time when presenting a talk people connect their laptop to a video projector. So they effectively have an extra screen at their disposal. Because of that many Software options for presentations use the extra screen of the laptop to display notes, time left for the talk, a preview of the next slide and such information to the presenter.

I'm using LaTeX-Beamer which outputs a pdf. I'd like to have notes, a preview of the next slide and the time I have left for my talk displayed to me on the laptop screen, while the projector shows the regular presentation slides.

Ideally this program should work under Linux (Ubuntu 12.04). Does such a program exist?

Answer 1

So pdfpc on git (which is forked and improved version of the pdf-presenter-console) is the closest thing I found.

Features

Except for reading out notes in Beamer-Presentations It has all the features I looked for. Regular slides on the projector, view of the next slide and the current one on the laptop. It pre-caches the slides for fast switch and can provide an overview with thumbnails for each slide (quick selection). It also plays videos. With the n one can edit notes that are stored in a textfile in the same directory as the pdf. The latest version supports LaTeX-Beamer notes now but doesn't have a stable release yet, which means you have to pull it from git (see edit below).

Usage

To use, one has to invoke pdfpc with a PDF file like this in terminal:

pdfpc presentation.pdf

Of course once can add it to the list of applications to open pdfs with in your file-manager to make it easier. There command line options to interchange screens, set the timer hand have it coutn down instead of up.

The rest is straight forward and documented in the man pages. Ubuntu man-pages are outdated so one should consult the man pages on the site. I made request for importing LaTeX-Beamer notes.

Installation / Compilation

For Windows PCs it might be a pain in the rear to compile, since the requirements state:

• Vala Compiler Version >=0.11.0
• Gnu compiler collection
• CMake Version >=2.6
• Gtk+ 2.x
• libPoppler with glib bindings

Which is a handful to install and get running. For Ubuntu and other Debian users it's a piece of cake as there are packages in the repositories.

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Edit:

This is how the Latex-Beamer \notes{} thing turned out:

Hi!

[...] Die aktuelle git Version unterstütz beamer Notes, mit --notes={left,right,top,bottom} (erst seit ein paar Tage! [sic]). Ich hoffe bald auch eine stabile Version rausgeben zu können.

Gruß, David

Translation:

Hi

[...] the current git version supports beamer notes (for a few days now). Just use --notes={left,right,top,bottom}. I hope I will be able to release a stable version soon.

Regards, David

Answer 2

In case you're still interested, I have written a small viewing application in C++, called "dspdfviewer" for "Dual-Screen PDF Viewer".

Its built specifically for latex-beamer, and it's "show notes on second screen" option. This latex-beamer option will give you a double-width PDF, where the right part are your beamer-notes, and the right part can include a small preview of the current/next page. Check out the beamerguide for details. Only, I did not find a viewing application to correctly display those kinds of PDFs.

My program splits the PDF file in half and renders the left half in fullscreen on the "primary" screen (intended for the audience) and the second half together with some timers on the "secondary" screen (your notebook for example).

It currently works with Debian wheezy, and Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) and newer.

You can download it for Ubuntu on the ppa https://launchpad.net/~dannyedel/+archive/dspdfviewer

The sourcecode is available at https://github.com/dannyedel/dspdfviewer, and the documentation is available as man page (included in the deb packages as "man dspdfviewer").

Answer 3

Browsing around this morning, I came across pympress. I have not tried it yet myself, but it looks like it might do what you want.

Answer 4

I tested only a few minutes, but it is worth to take a look to

Impressive - Is a presentation program that displays slideshows of image files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF and BMP) or PDF documents. Rendering is done via OpenGL, which allows for some "eye candy" effects.

Installation is simply apt-get install impressive in Debian based distributions. Complete features are better explained in impressive -h,man impressive and impressive /usr/share/doc/impressive/demo.pdf but off the top of my head there are options for automatically advance, show timer an progress bar, control display aspect ratio, background rendering (by default active), cache modes, rotating, scaling and shuffling pages, use a custom cursor, make transitions, etc.

I have found mostly interesting the possibility of highlight boxes with the mouse during the presentation and even save and restore this for a second session as well as the spot light mode (a highlight circle around the mouse) and the overview mode (with Tab to quickly select a thumbnail with the mouse) , but you can also include options to include sound and videos, adjust gamma and black level with options or sort keys, mark pages with the skip flag, etc.