Konny From The Blog

Last year I started creating my presentations with LaTeX instead of OpenOffice Impress. I really like it since you have all the advantages you have on normal documents too, like WYSIWYM, easy integration with version control… Plus there is a really nice LaTeX beamer theme for the corporate design of my university. The only thing I miss is the Oracle Presenter Console (formerly known as “Sun Presenter Console”…). That nice piece of software enabled you to see your presentation, some notes and the next slide on your laptop screen while the audience watches the normal presentation. This feature is build-in in LaTeX beamer too. Just add

\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=left}

to the preamble and LaTeX will generate slides that are twice as wide as normal (actually you can use either left, right, top or bottom but I like my desktop to be on the left so I prefer left). So if your monitor and your projector have the same resolution the wide slides will be spread over both when your PDF Reader switches to fullscreen.

BUT: It is required to have  a virtual monitor spanning over both real monitors. And that is not possible since Windows Vista. If I got it right, the new driver model Microsoft introduced with Windows Vista doesn’t allow the graphic card driver (which should care about this) to provide this feature.

Fortunately the solution is quite  simple: you just need a program that sends Ctrl+L to the Acrobat Reader and resizes the upcoming fullscreen window to fit both screens…but you wont find anything on Google that works (except of impress!ve but that one was very bloated and uncomfortable).

So I decided to write it on my own…and I like it. Just follow the instruction, they are clear. (I guess – “Every time you make it fool proof  they invent better fools.” )

After dropping the  icon into Acrobat’s window the presentation starts. The example from here looks like this:

As you can see I added a little stop watch since this isn’t easy to implement with LaTeX.   The little window gives the focus to the presentation window as soon as it gets it so that all know hotkeys will work, especially Space and the arrow keys to navigate through the presentation. If you need to demonstrate something (like a little program) don’t worry to hit ESC. This will close the fullscreen so that your projector screen is free to use it for something else. After this you have to use the presentation icon to the right of the stop watch to continue the presentation by dropping it into Acrobat’s window again.

One last word to screen resolutions: your laptop screen should have at least the resolution of the projector. It helps if the resolutions are the same on the edge where the notes and the slides fall together (e.g. if you enabled show notes on second screen=left the height of both monitors should be the same). In my example I used 1366x768px on my laptop (which is native) and 1024x768px on the projector. You will see the taskbar if that differs – which is a problem one can live with…

Download: launchpad.net