LaTeX beamer presenter console
As I said before I like both LaTeX beamer and the Oracle Presenter Console. After taking a big step to bring presentation notes on the second screen on Windows 7 I recently took the last step of showing the next slide to the presenter. Here is how you do it (on all platforms).
The idea is to compile a version of your document without notes first and use the resulting PDF to include it in the second screen part of the presentation. This way it is possible to include slides that haven’t been generated yet. The idea is based on the instructions of Julián Villegas. I just made it easier to use (at least for me) and changed the layout to fit the model of the Oracle Presenter Console .
Note that you need to use pdflatex as this includes images from a PDF file.
- At first you need to download the two attached files
preview.texandpresenterconsole.texand copy them to your beamer directory. Editpreview.texto use your main document as input (I usedpresenter.tex). You can modifypresenterconsole.texto change the position of the second screen. - Now edit your main document to include
presenterconsole.texusing\input{presenterconsole} - Make sure to remove all
\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen}commands in the main document. - Now build
preview.pdffrompreview.texas often as you need to resolve references. You should get a presentation without notes. - The last step is to build your document as usual. The result should look similar to my presentation shown on the pictures.
I don’t know what is the best work flow to built such a presentation. As it takes double the time to compile both versions of the presentation my guess is to work on the preview version without notes. You write the notes into your slides “blindly” and review them after completing the whole presentation or from time to time. Plus I don’t know how well it fits to your building environment but that’s your problem. 
As I use Makefile it’s not a problem for me at all.
That’s it for now. I guess we can proclaim the end of OOo Impress, can’t we?
Attached files:
Hey Konny,
really nice work here. I’m using it for the presentation of my thesis with the beamer template of my university.
However I experienced a minor bug. The preview of the next slide was shown in the right column, but was positioned vertically under the current slide. This caused the notes to be shown outside the slide.
I changed the the definition of the note page in presenterconsole.tex to:
\AtBeginNote {
\begin{columns}[c]
Now it’s working for me.
Thank you very much for the nice console.
Greetz,
Thomas
thanks, I will include it soon