notes

Latex/Beamer: Do you type too many notes?

 in Latex  tagged beamer / Latex / notes / template by

We most certainly do!

For that reason we needed to make the template for the notes as simple as possible. To avoid developing our own template for the notes page, we used one of the three basic predefined templates named plain.

Using plain we got an empty slide in the notes page which allowed us to add a lot more content!

The basic 3 template options for the notes slide are the following

  1. default The default template shows the last slide in the upper right corner and some information that should help you match a note page to the slide that is currently shown (e.g. title of section and subsection).
  2. compress The option produces an output that is similar to the default, it fits more content onto each note page at the price of legibility.
  3. plain An empty page to add notes to.

Usage example:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{pgfpages}
\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right}
\setbeamertemplate{note page}[default]
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
Some content.
\note{Some note for the content}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Latex/Beamer: Undefined control sequence. …meroption{show notes on second screen=right}

 in Latex  tagged beamer / dspdfviewer / Latex / notes / pgfpages by

When trying to enable the option that shows presentation notes on a different monitor using:

\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right}

we got the following error:

Undefined control sequence. …meroption{show notes on second screen=right}
Missing \begin{document}. …meroption{show notes on second screen=right}

To fix this issue we enabled the package pgfpages

\usepackage{pgfpages}

To present this special built PDF presentation across two screens we used dspdfviewer.

dspdfviewer is a pre-rendering and caching (read: fast) full-screen pdf viewer specifically designed for latex-beamer presentations, that were created with the show notes on second screen=right option (\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right}).

https://dspdfviewer.danny-edel.de/
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man1/dspdfviewer.1.html

Special note: when we were testing dspdfviewer on Ubuntu 20.04LTS we thought that the secondary screen had to be on the left of the primary (because of the build command that specifies that notes need to be on the right). That was actually wrong, as you will see in the following picture even though we built the presentation to have the notes on the “right” dspdfviewer was able to work as expected even when the secondary screen was on top of the primary.