BeamerPresenter is a PDF viewer for presentations designed to show additional information to the speaker on a separate screen. Multimedia content and tools for drawing/highlighting allow you to make the presentation interactive. The modular user interface can show notes (text or separate PDF file), a timer, thumbnails of the slides, and other widgets.
This software uses the Qt framework and the PDF engine MuPDF or Poppler.
These screenshots show only a few examples how the speaker's screen can look. The audience sees only the presentation except if you specify something else.
To install BeamerPresenter, you first need to choose a variant that is compatible with you setup. You can choose the PDF engine (Poppler, MuPDF, or QtPDF) and the Qt version (≥5.9 or ≥6.2). It is recommended to use Qt 6 (if available) and Poppler or MuPDF. More details can be found in the installation manual.
BeamerPresenter can be found in the Nix repositories and in the AUR (for Arch/Manjaro/Endeavour, also as a mainline version). The releases come with packages for Arch/Manjaro/Endeavour, Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04, and flatpak. For example, the commands for installing BeamerPresenter with Poppler as PDF engine after downloading the corresponding file are:
# Ubuntu 24.04:
sudo apt install ./beamerpresenter-poppler-0.2.5-qt6-noble-x86_64.deb
# Ubuntu 22.04:
sudo apt install ./beamerpresenter-poppler-0.2.5-qt5-jammy-x86_64.deb
# Ubuntu 20.04:
sudo apt install ./beamerpresenter-poppler-0.2.5-qt5-focal-x86_64.deb
# Arch/Manjaro:
sudo pacman -U beamerpresenter-poppler-qt5-0.2.5-1-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-qt5.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 Windows, it is possible to build and install BeamerPresenter using MSYS2. See INSTALL.md and packaging/Windows.md for details.
The libraries required to build BeamerPresenter are also available on other platforms (see installation manual). Issues or pull requests concerning building on any platform are welcome!
There are two different aspects of the configuration:
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 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
).
The user interface is configured in a separate JSON file (GUI config, gui.json
) as
documented in man 5 beamerpresenter-ui
. This file cannot be edited in the
graphical interface.
Example configurations are usually installed in /usr/share/doc/beamerpresenter/examples
.
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>
.
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
).
The following known problems have low priority. If one of these problems is relevant for you, please also open an issue.
\sound
command; workaround: use \movie
instead).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.