This program shows a presentation to your audience while providing additional information on a second screen. The presentation must be a PDF file. It is assumed that the arrangement of windows and screens is done by the window manager (i.e. the user).
BeamerPresenter is highly customizable. But only parts of the configuration can be done using a graphical interface. Details are provided in the man pages.
An overview:
man 5 beamerpresenter.conf.man 5 beamerpresenter-ui.BeamerPresenter creates windows consisting of widgets. The windows and widgets are defined by a JSON file as documented in man 5 beamerpresenter-ui. You can create a custom file or use multiple configuration files for different presentation formats.
Examples can be found in /usr/share/doc/packages/BeamerPresenter/examples.
The most important widget is the slide widget. It shows a slide of a presentation. For the audience you usually have a window which consists only of a single slide widget.
Slide widgets can also be used to show a preview of the next slides to the speaker.
Interaction with the user interface is done via keyboard shortcuts, buttons, and tools associated with pointing devices (mouse, touch screen, etc.). Shortcuts can be configured in the settings widget. Buttons are defined in the user interface configuration file and behave similar to keyboard shortcuts. Both shortcuts and buttons can either cause an action (e.g. going to the next page) or select a tool.
Tools (pen, highlighter, text, eraser, pointer, selection tools, ...) allow the presenter to draw or highlight in the presentation. All drawings and highlighting features are synchronized between slide widgets which show the same slide of a presentation.
Tools are connected to a specific input device (e.g. the left mouse button, a touch screen, or a pen input). When selecting a tool by pushing a button, this tool is by default only connected to the tool with which the button was pressed. For example, you can select a tool only for the right mouse button or only for a touch screen. Other devices remain unchanged and keep their tools. Buttons can, however, be configured to change the tool for all devices or a selection of devices. Also for keyboard shortcuts which select a tool it is possible to define a device (or selection of devices).
Important actions when using draw tools are the "undo" and "redo" action. Note that and "undo" history is kept per slide, i.e., "undo" will only undo the last drawing or erasing step on the currently visible slide.
For more details on tools and actions see man 5 beamerpresenter-ui.
Use the "open" (default shortcut: Ctrl+O) and "save" (Ctrl+S) or "save as" (Ctrl+Shift+S) actions to load or save drawings (without changing the PDF file). You can also directly open a file created by BeamerPresenter (or Xournal++) with BeamerPresenter.
BeamerPresenter uses gzipped xml files (.bpr) aiming for compatibility with Xournal++ (.xopp files). These files do not include the PDF file. BeamerPresenter can read drawings and text annotations in a PDF from .xoj or .xopp files created by Xournal or Xournal++. Xournal++ can read files created by BeamerPresenter and convert them to Xournal's .xoj format if necessary.
BeamerPresenter files mainly include drawings, text annotations and rich text notes created by the user. But they can also store the duration of the presentation, the overlay mode of the drawings, and times defined per slide. These times allow the speaker to easily check the time relative to a predefined schedule through the color of the timer widget.
Notes and additional information for the speaker can be provided in three ways. Every option requires a properly configured user interface (man 5 beamerpresenter-ui).
The first option is to generate two presentation files, of which one contains some extra information. BeamerPresenter can show two slides from two different PDF files. Note that tools (drawings, pointing tools) will not be synchronized between slides which belong to different PDFs. The PDFs should have the same number of pages, but do not need to have the same page size. Use the option "file":"presentation" or "file":"notes" of the "slide" widget in the GUI configuration.
The second option results in a similar view in BeamerPresenter, but uses the possibility to put presentation and notes in the same file as done by LaTeX beamer when using the option "show notes on second screen". In this case every page in the PDF should be split into a left and a right half, showing the presentation and the notes, respectively. BeamerPresenter automatically detects this situation based on the aspect ratio of the PDF pages. Use the "page part":"left" and "page part":"right" option of the "slide" widget in the GUI configuration.
The third option is to provide notes in a simple rich text editor, the "notes" widget. The notes can be saved in an XML document (keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+S in the notes widget) and will be included in a gzipped XML file when saving drawings, times etc.
This software may be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), version 3, available on the GNU website, or (at your choice) any newer version of the same license. You can find more details about the license in the LICENSE file, which you should have obtained with this software, and which is also available on github.
BeamerPresenter is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.