• supports embedded gifs (out of the box), videos, and audios (with VLC or Gstreamer integration)
• text annotations displayed in the presenter window
• natively supports beamer’s notes on second screen, as well as Libreoffice notes pages!

•

Two-screen display: See on your laptop or tablet display the current slide, the next slide, the talk time and wall-clock time, and annotations (either PDF annotations, beamer notes on second slide, or Libreoffice notes pages). The position of the beamer or Libreoffice notes in the slide is detected automatically and can be overridden via a menu option.

If you do not want to use second-slide beamer notes but prefer to have notes on their own pages, you can enable auto-detection of these notes. Use the following snippet that prefixes the page labels with notes: on notes pages:

\addtobeamertemplate{note page}{}{\thispdfpagelabel{notes:\insertframenumber}}

• Media support: supports playing video, audio, and gif files embedded in (or linked from) the PDF file, with optional start/end times and looping.
• Highlight mode: Allows one to draw freehand on the slide currently on screen.
• Go To Slide: To jump to a selected slide without flashing through the whole presentation on the projector, press G or click the “current slide” box. Using J or clicking the slide label will allow you to navigate slide labels instead of page numbers, useful e.g. for multi-page slides from beamer \pause.

  A spin box will appear, and you will be able to navigate through your slides in the presenter window only by scrolling your mouse, with the Home/Up/Down/End keys, with the + and - buttons of the spin box, or simply by typing in the number of the slide. Press Enter to validate going to the new slide or Esc to cancel.

• Deck Overview: Pressing D will open an overview of your whole slide deck, and any slide can be opened from can simply clicking it.
• Software pointer: Clicking on the slide (in either window) while holding ctrl down will display a software laser pointer on the slide. Or press L to permanently switch on the laser pointer.
• Talk time breakdown: The Presentation > Timing Breakdown menu item displays a breakdown of how much time was spent on each slide, with a hierarchical breakdown per chapters/sections/etc. if available in the PDF.
• Automatic file reloading: If the file is modified, pympress will reload it (and preserve the current slide, current time, etc.)
• Big button mode: Add big buttons (duh) for touch displays.
• Swap screens: If Pympress mixed up which screen is the projector and which is not, press S
• Automatic full screen: pympress will automatically put the content window fullscreen on your non-primay screen when:

• Estimated talk time: Click the Time estimation box and set your planned talk duration. The color will allow you to see at a glance how much time you have left.
• Adjust screen centering: If your slides’ form factor doesn’t fit the projectors’ and you don’t want the slide centered in the window, use the “Screen Center” option in the “Presentation” menu.
• Resize Current/Next slide: You can drag the bar between both slides on the Presenter window to adjust their relative sizes to your liking.
• Caching: For efficiency, Pympress caches rendered pages (up to 200 by default). If this is too memory consuming for you, you can change this number in the configuration file.
• Configurability: Your preferences are saved in a configuration file, and many options are accessible there directly. These include:

See the configuration file documentation for more details,

• Editable PDF annotations: Annotations can be added, removed, or changed, and the modified PDF files can be saved
• Automatic next slide and looping

• -h, --help: Shows a list of all command line arguments.
• -t mm[:ss], --talk-time=mm[:ss]: The estimated (intended) talk time in minutes and optionally seconds.
• -n position, --notes=position: Set the position of notes on the pdf page (none, left, right, top, or bottom). Overrides the detection from the file.
• --log=level: Set level of verbosity in log file (DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR).

• Gstreamer installed (enabled by default), with its gtk plugin (libgstgtk) which is sometimes packaged separately (e.g. as gst-plugin-gtk or gstreamer1.0-gtk3), and plugins gstreamer-good/-bad/-ugly based on which codecs you need, or
• VLC installed (and the python-vlc module), with enabled = on under the [vlc] section of your config file.

• ~/.config/pympress on Linux,
• %APPDATA%/pympress.ini on Windows,
• ~/Library/Preferences/pympress on macOS,
• in the top-level of the pympress install directory for portable installations.

•

All-horizontal layout:

+----+----+----+
| Cu | No | Nx |
+----+----+----+

Setting:

notes = {"children": ["current", "notes", "next"], "proportions": [0.33, 0.33, 0.33], "orientation": "horizontal", "resizeable": true}

•

All-vertical layout:

+----+
| Cu |
+----+
| No |
+----+
| Nx |
+----+

Setting:

notes = {"children": ["current", "notes", "next"], "proportions": [0.33, 0.33, 0.33], "orientation": "vertical", "resizeable": true}

•

Vertical layout with horizontally divided top pane:

+----+----+
| Cu | No |
+----+----+
|    Nx   |
+---------+

Setting:

notes = {"children": [


  			{"children": ["current", "notes"], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "horizontal", "resizeable": true},


  			"next"


  		], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "vertical", "resizeable": true}

•

Horizontal layout with horizontally divided right pane:

+----+----+
|    | Nx |
+ Cu +----+
|    | No |
+---------+

Setting:

notes = {"children": [


  			"current",


  			{"children": ["next", "notes"], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "vertical", "resizeable": true}


  		], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "horizontal", "resizeable": true}

• for notes: “current”, “notes”, “next”
• for plain: “current”, “next” and “annotations” (the annotations widget is toggled with the A key by default)
• for highlight: same as plain with “highlight” instead of “current”

• If you set “resizeable” to false, the panes won’t be resizeable dynamically with a handle in the middle
• “proportions” are normalized, and saved on exit if you resize panes during the execution. If you set them to 4 and 1, the panes will be 4 / (4 + 1) = 20% and 1 / (4 + 1) = 100%, so the ini will contain something like 0.2 and 0.8 after executing pympress.

1.

Install a theme

There are 2 locations, either install the theme for all your gtk apps, e.g. in C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\themes, or just for pympress, so in %INSTALLDIR%\share\themes (for me that’s C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Programs\pympress\share\themes)

Basically pick a theme e.g. from this list of dark themes <https://www.gnome-look.org/browse/cat/135/ord/rating/?tag=dark> and make sure to unpack it in the selected directory, it needs at least %THEMENAME%\gtk-3.0\gtk.css and %THEMENAME%\index.theme, where THEMENAME is the name of the theme.

There are 2 pitfalls to be aware of, to properly install a theme:

2.

Set the theme as default

Create a settings.ini file, either under C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\gtk-3.0 (global setting) or %INSTALLDIR%\etc\gtk-3.0 (just pympress) and set the contents:

[Settings]
gtk-theme-name=THEMENAME

• Change GTK+3 look on Windows <https://stackoverflow.com/a/39041558/1387346> which contains a list of all interesting directories
• How to get native windows decorations on GTK3 on Windows 7+ and MSYS2 <https://stackoverflow.com/a/37060369/1387346> which details the process