BeamerPresenter

BeamerPresenter is a PDF viewer for presentations, which opens a presentation screen and a control screen in two different windows. The control screen optionally shows slides from a dedicated notes document instead of the slides for the audience. Additional information on the control screen includes a clock, a timer for the presentation, and previews of the next slides.

This software uses the Qt framework and the PDF engines MuPDF or poppler.

Features (selection)

• modular user interface: adapt for your presentation style and technical equipment (number of monitors, extra information for the speaker, input devices, ...)
• compressed cache for fast slide changes
• draw in slides, save drawings in a format compatible with Xournal++
• highlighting tools (pointer, torch, magnifier)
• rich text notes for the speaker
• (optionally) show separate presentation file for speaker or use LaTeX-beamer's option to show notes on second screen (split PDF pages into a part for the speaker and a part or the audience)
• timer indicates progress relative to a predefined schedule by it's color
• navigate using document outline, thumbnail slides, page numbers/labels and links
• videos in presentations
• slide transitions

Screenshots

These screenshots only a few examples how the speaker's screen can look. The audiance sees only the presentation except if you speficy something else.

Default configuration of the graphical interface with previews of the next slides:	Similar configuration with different Qt theme:
Speaker screen for example configuration gui-interactive.json, can be used e.g. for lectures. Annotations can be saved in a format that is compatible with Xournal++.	PDF documents can include videos, sounds, and slide transitions.

Installation

There exist different variants of BeamerPresenter: You can choose the PDF engine (Poppler, MuPDF, or QtPDF) and the Qt version (≥5.9 or ≥6.2). Some arguments for this choice, more customization options, and the manual installation are explained here.

Packages are also available for Nix and in the AUR (for Arch/Manjaro). The releases come with packages for Arch/Manjaro, Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04, and flatpak. For example, the commands for installing BeamerPresenter with poppler as PDF engine and Qt 5 after downloading the corresponding file are:

# Ubuntu 20.04:
sudo apt install ./beamerpresenter-poppler-0.2.2-qt5-focal-x86_64.deb
# Ubuntu 22.04:
sudo apt install ./beamerpresenter-poppler-0.2.2-qt5-jammy-x86_64.deb
# Arch/Manjaro:
sudo pacman -U beamerpresenter-poppler-qt5-0.2.2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
# Flatpak:
flatpak install org.kde.Platform/x86_64/5.15-21.08 # can be skipped if already installed
flatpak install beamerpresenter.flatpak

The build process for these packages is explained here. Verify the signature of the checksums in SHA256SUMS:

gpg --keyserver hkps://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys DD11316A0D8E585F
gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.sig SHA256SUMS

In Arch Linux and Manjaro you can also install one of the AUR packages beamerpresenter and beamerpresenter-git. Note that in these packages by default MuPDF is selected as PDF engine.

There exists a package for Nix (thanks to the maintainer!). This package can be installed with

nix-env -iA nixos.beamerpresenter    # on NixOS
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.beamerpresenter  # on non-NixOS

The libraries required to build BeamerPresenter are also available on other platforms and it seems possible to compile also on macOS (with homebrew) and in Windows. However, I can't test on macOS and building in Windows has only reached a proof-of-concept state (using WSL is an alternative). Issues or pull requests concerning building on any platform are welcome!

Configuration

There are two different aspects of the configuration:

Program settings

Settings for the program are configured in the configuration file beamerpresenter.conf as documented in man 5 beamerpresenter.conf. Most of these settings can also be changed in the settings widget in the graphical interface, but some of these settings require a restart of the program.

Some program settings can be temporarily overwritten using command line arguments (documented in beamerpresenter --help or man 1 beamerpresenter).

User interface

The user interface is configured in a separate JSON file (GUI config, gui.json) as documented in man 5 beamerpresenter-ui. This file can not be edited in the graphical interface.

The GUI config defines which widgets are shown, including the number of windows, tool buttons, notes for the speaker, combination of different PDF files, and various other settings. A GUI config file can be selected temporarily with the command line option -g <file>.

Bugs

If you find bugs or have suggestions for improvements, please open an issue.

When reporting bugs, please include the version string of BeamerPresenter (beamerpresenter --version).

Known problems

• Multimedia
  • Video performance can be bad while drawing or using the magnifier.
  • Sounds included as sound link (not sound annotation) are unsupported when using MuPDF (this affects LaTeX beamer's \sound command; workaround: use \movie instead).
  • Some slide transitions need to stop videos. Fly slide transitions during videos look strange.
• Changing tool buttons via the user interface is non-permanent. Permanent changes in the user interface require manual changes in the JSON-formatted configuration file.
• Clipboard compatibility with external applications using the SVG standard is experimental. SVGs generated with BeamerPresenter may be corrupt and might lead to the crash of other applications. Pasting from other applications will usually not work.
• The detection of unsaved changes is not reliable. The warning of unsaved changes can be avoided by using the action "quit unsafe" instead of "quit".
• Sometimes slides are not automatically rendered to the correct size when resizing the window. Changing or updating the page should solve this.
• The cache of slides does not handle PDF files with varying page sizes correctly.
• If a preview shows specific overlays, slide changes adding or removing synchronization of this preview with another widget may lead to short flickering. Slide transitions during such slide changes can contain some ugly artifacts.
• When compiling with both MuPDF and Poppler opening some PDF files with renderer=poppler can result in a segmentation fault (when loading the document or when rendering a certain page), apparently due to a linkage problem. It is recommended to compile with only one PDF engine.
• In MuPDF only a smaller subset of PDF link types is supported (only internal navigation links and external links) as compared to the Poppler version.
• Slide transitions and animations might not work as expected if (at least) one window showing the slide is currently hidden and not updated by the window manager.

License

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 web site. Compiled versions of this program depend on or include components licensed under the GPL and other free software licenses. More details about the license can be found in the LICENSE file.

BeamerPresenter can be compiled without MuPDF, using only poppler as a PDF engine. When not using MuPDF in any way, this software may, alternatively to the AGPL, be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3 or any later version, available on the GNU web site.

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.