IpePresenter: better presentations using PDF

IpePresenter is a presentation tool to show PDF presentations (made with Ipe or with the beamer Latex package).

IpePresenter opens two windows: You move one window to the external monitor and make it full screen, so that your audience can see your slides. Your own window displays the current slide, the next slide, the page notes you wrote for each slide, and a running timer.

Screenshot of IpePresenter

IpePresenter relies entirely on the PDF file, so no Latex is needed for a presentation. IpePresenter will work fine from a USB-stick, with nothing installed on the host computer.

IpePresenter will automatically show the page notes you added in Ipe. If you wish to add page notes to your beamer presentation, see below.

The PDF interpreter in IpePresenter is not a complete PDF implementation, so PDF presentations made with other tools may not work. Occasionally you may also find that something you made in beamer will not display correctly—please file a bug report and attach the presentation so that I can fix this.

Downloads

The current version is IpePresenter 7.2.28.

I'm making four downloads of IpePresenter available: a binary distribution for Windows, a binary package for Mac OS X, binary packages for several Linux-distributions, and a source package that should compile on any recent Unix system.

Windows binary package

ipepresenter-7.2.28-win64.zip

Unzip this package somewhere on your Windows computer. The IpePresenter executable is in the bin subdirectory.

(Note that you do not need to download this if you have already downloaded the Windows distribution of Ipe—it contains IpePresenter.)

Mac OS X binary package

Download the following disk image and copy IpePresenter.app onto your Mac running Mac OS 10.10 or higher.

Security warning: When you try to normally open a newly downloaded version of IpePresenter, MacOS will show a security warning that says that it cannot verify the developer and that it cannot check for malicious software. This is the normal behaviour of MacOS. Control-Click the IpePresenter icon, then choose "Open" from the shortcut menu.

For Apple computers with Intel processor: ipepresenter-7.2.28-mac-intel.dmg

For Apple computers with ARM processor ("Apple silicon"): ipepresenter-7.2.28-mac-arm.dmg

May the source be with you

ipe-7.2.28.tar.gz

The IpePresenter sources are part of the Ipe source tree. See the install.txt file for instructions.

Page notes

If you use beamer or any other LaTeX package to produce your slides, you can use the pdfcomment package to insert notes into your presentation that will be displayed on the presenter's screen.

In your document preamble, load pdfcomment and define a new command like this:

\usepackage{pdfcomment}
\newcommand{\pdfnote}[1]{\marginnote{\pdfcomment[icon=note]{#1}}}

You can then add notes to your slides by using this on a slide:

\pdfnote{remember to say hello}

Alternative tools

Some alternative tools that inspired IpePresenter are the following:

Reporting bugs

Before reporting a bug, please verify that you have the latest IpePresenter version. Please do not send bug reports directly to me (the first thing I would do with your report is to enter it into the bug tracker).

To report bugs, please use the bug tracker (click on New issue).

Sponsor IpePresenter development

You now have the opportunity to become a member of the community that sponsors IpePresenter's development.

Copyright

IpePresenter is "free," this means that everyone is free to use it and free to redistribute it on certain conditions. Ipe is not in the public domain; it is copyrighted and there are restrictions on its distribution as follows:

Copyright © 1993–2023 Otfried Cheong

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Gnu General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the Gnu General Public License for more details.