Is there a specialized Pdf viewer for Latex-Beamer presentations on Linux?

Browsing around this morning, I came across pympress.

It is cross-platform as it is written in python, and has the presenter look & feel you're looking for, with a window to show slides on screen and another for your laptop with time, slide numbers, next slide preview, annotations, etc.

A few other nice features are native support for beamer notes on second screen, embedded videos, and more.

In case you're still interested, I have written a small viewing application in C++, called "dspdfviewer" for "Dual-Screen PDF Viewer".

Its built specifically for latex-beamer, and it's "show notes on second screen" option. This latex-beamer option will give you a double-width PDF, where the right part are your beamer-notes, and the right part can include a small preview of the current/next page. Check out the beamerguide for details. Only, I did not find a viewing application to correctly display those kinds of PDFs.

My program splits the PDF file in half and renders the left half in fullscreen on the "primary" screen (intended for the audience) and the second half together with some timers on the "secondary" screen (your notebook for example).

It currently works with Debian wheezy, and Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) and newer.

You can download it for Ubuntu on the ppa https://launchpad.net/~dannyedel/+archive/dspdfviewer

The sourcecode is available at https://github.com/dannyedel/dspdfviewer, and the documentation is available as man page (included in the deb packages as "man dspdfviewer").

I tested only a few minutes, but it is worth to take a look to

Impressive - Is a presentation program that displays slideshows of image files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF and BMP) or PDF documents. Rendering is done via OpenGL, which allows for some "eye candy" effects.

Installation is simply apt-get install impressive in Debian based distributions. Complete features are better explained in impressive -h,man impressive and impressive /usr/share/doc/impressive/demo.pdf but off the top of my head there are options for automatically advance, show timer an progress bar, control display aspect ratio, background rendering (by default active), cache modes, rotating, scaling and shuffling pages, use a custom cursor, make transitions, etc.

I have found mostly interesting the possibility of highlight boxes with the mouse during the presentation and even save and restore this for a second session as well as the spot light mode (a highlight circle around the mouse) and the overview mode (with Tab to quickly select a thumbnail with the mouse) , but you can also include options to include sound and videos, adjust gamma and black level with options or sort keys, mark pages with the skip flag, etc.

There is also slider which is designed to be lightweight and specialised. It is designed to allow the use of notes on a second screen etc. Since it is relatively new, it may be worth watching even if a feature you need isn't yet currently implemented. (It has changed quite a lot since I started playing with it.)

My favorite pdf reader is Mupdf: (1) Firstly, the rendering of the popler-engine used in most pdf-viewers is horribly and mupdf's rendering is far superior (2) it's the reference pdf-viewer from ghostscript project

(3) Is quite easy to use it just with a keyboard (what makes the mupdf-pdf-viewer (and onmupdf based reader)) great for presentations

As of September 2017 under opensuse, Leap 42.3, I googled again for a PDF viewer which allows to use the second screen option of beamer.

MuPDF doesn't support a second screen with notes at all. dspdfviewer wasn't available as a package for opensuse, so I didn't try. pdfpc worked out of the box, but you can't play embedded content, e.g. a video from it, if the video was linked with this command (given in the beamer manual, but see the comment of giordano below):

  movie[externalviewer]{includegraphics[width=0.87textwidth,angle=180]{IMG-0898}}{IMG-0899.mkv}

Finally I came across pympress, which turned out to be under active development. I installed it as root from command line:

python3 -m pip install pympress

pympress started my video and I'll invest some more time testing it.

I made a web-based viewer which simply opens the slides and the notes on separate windows, keeping them in sync. The windows can be moved freely and expanded (F11) on another monitor like any window.

It accepts double-width LaTeX-Beamer PDFs which can be generated using setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right}.

The application works in a web browser and doesn't require any installation. The PDF is rendered locally and the app can work offline (kept in the browser's cache). It has been tested with recent versions of Firefox (61) and Chrome (67).

It is available at https://beamerviewer.pacien.org/. A demo can also be found here.

The source code is available on this GitHub repository.

I wrote a tool called BeamerPresenter (based on QT5 and poppler), which shows presentation and notes for the speaker in two separate windows. Presentation and notes can be provided as two separate pdf files or as a single file with the LaTeX beamer option “show notes on second screen”.

It supports multimedia content, animations (by showing slides in rapid succession), slide transitions, special treatment of overlays and prerendering of slides to cache. For the speaker it offers navigation by scrolling, key bindings (aware of overlays), a table of contents and an overview of the slides.

I found the 'PDF Presenter Console' in the Ubuntu Software Center, works well for me with showing next slide and time!

Edit: Here is a screenshot of how it looks on my 2 screens:

I used okular.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install okular

Open the pdf presentation and use "presentation mode" as View >> Presentation. You are good to go. With this I can play my mp4 and other animations as well.