BeamerPresenter

A native macOS (Apple Silicon) presenter app for LaTeX Beamer decks, modelled on magicPresenter. The audience screen shows the slide; your laptop shows a full presenter console: current slide, next slide, speaker notes, a thumbnail strip, a slide overview, and a timer.

It works directly off a compiled PDF; it can also compile a .tex (via a local LaTeX install) or convert a PowerPoint .pptx (via LibreOffice) on the fly, and pull \note{} speaker notes straight from a .tex.

Version 3.0 (2026-06-21).

GUI

• Launch splash — shown alone at startup, then the home screen appears.
• Menu bar — every command lives here: File (Open, Save Presentation As… with ink & boards, Save Notes, Close), Presentation (next/previous/first/last, overview, blackout, black-screen presets, start/stop + reset timer), Tools (pen, laser, pen colours, undo/clear ink), Whiteboard (toggle, boards, add text/table/QR, save/insert). App holds About + Settings (⌘,). The Presentation/Tools/Whiteboard menus appear only while a deck is open.
• Home screen — open PDF/.tex button, a large drop zone (drop a PDF/.tex to open, or a folder to add it to favorites), a LaTeX dependency status (green/yellow), favorite folders (expand to the PDFs inside; add with the +), a recent-files list, and a bottom dashboard (presentations run, average + total time, version).
• Menu bar icon — a Time Machine-style status item with quick actions (open, show presenter, next/previous, blackout, whiteboard, settings, quit).
• Settings (⌘,) — open at login, show/hide the menu bar icon, run in background (menu-bar-only, no Dock icon), the default black audience screen, its message (with presets + clear) and a background image.

Saving an annotated presentation

File ▸ Save Presentation As… writes a new PDF of the whole deck with your freehand ink burned onto each slide and every whiteboard inserted after the slide it was created on. It defaults to the source folder (next to the .tex/.pdf) and afterwards reports where each board was placed.

• Presenter console — a centered control bar with every live tool, each a captioned symbol (exit, prev/next + slide counter, overview, blackout, whiteboard, pen, laser, the pen-colour swatches, undo/clear ink, a start/stop + reset timer, elapsed + clock), large current slide, next slide, notes pane, and a scratch-notes field autosaved as <pdf>.notes.txt (resizable, with quick-insert of time/deck/slide, or exported to a chosen .txt via its button / File ▸ Save Notes…). Arrow keys still flip slides while the notes field is focused. Exit returns to the home screen; closing the presenter window also closes the audience window. The slide/sidebar and next/notes splits are draggable and persist. The same commands are also in the menu bar. The red close button asks first, then hides the app to the menu bar (Quit with ⌘Q).
• Thumbnail strip — click any slide to jump; auto-scrolls to the current one.
• Overview grid — press G for a full grid of every slide; click to jump.
• Ink & laser — draw freehand on a slide (pen, 4 colours, undo/clear) or use a laser pointer (which uses the selected colour); both mirror live onto the audience screen.
• Whiteboard — press W for a blank white scratch slide to work through a calculation live. Draw on it, drop in text boxes, a clean Safari-style table (pick rows × columns from an Apple Notes-style grid), a QR code, or quick commands (time, deck name, slide number). Move and resize items with handles, delete any item via the red ✕ at its corner, keep several boards, export any of them to its own PDF, or insert one after the current slide into a copy of the deck PDF (the original is untouched). The board toolbar is a compact, Safari-like rounded bar.
• Audience window — full-bleed slide; fills the external display by default, or switch it to a normal resizable window via Presentation ▸ Audience Full Screen (or Settings). Starts blacked out by default; the black screen shows an optional centered message or, when empty, the clock.

How notes work

Compile your Beamer deck so each PDF page carries the slide on the left half and your \note{} text on the right half:

\documentclass{beamer}
\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}{Title}
  Slide content here.
  \note{These are my speaker notes for this slide.}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

The app detects the double-width layout automatically and splits each page: left half → audience, right half → your notes pane.

Notes straight from the .tex

You don't have to recompile with the second-screen option. If you open a plain PDF and a .tex file with the same base name sits next to it, the app reads your \note{…} text directly from the source and shows it in the notes pane. You can also do it the other way round — open (or drop) the .tex itself. The app opens the matching <name>.pdf beside it, or, if there isn't one, compiles it with a detected LaTeX engine (latexmk/pdflatex). If compilation fails (or no LaTeX is installed) it offers to open the source in an editor (Sublime Text / VS Code / default):

\begin{frame}{Title}
  Slide content here.
  \note{These are my speaker notes for this slide.}
\end{frame}

If there's no .tex with the same base name (or it has no notes), the app falls back to any other .tex in the same folder. Page mapping is exact when the matching Beamer .nav file is also present (it encodes each frame's page range, so overlays line up); otherwise each frame is treated as one page. A plain PDF with neither notes layout nor a .tex still presents fine — the notes pane just shows a hint instead.

Run it (development)

Requires Xcode / the Swift toolchain on macOS 13+.

cd BeamerPresenter
swift run

An open panel appears — pick your compiled PDF. The audience window goes fullscreen on your external display (or the only display if there's just one).

Keyboard / remote controls

Key	Action
→ / Space / Page Down	Next slide
← / Page Up	Previous slide
Home / End	First / last slide
G	Toggle the slide overview
B	Black out the audience screen
W	Toggle the whiteboard scratch slide
R	Reset the elapsed timer
P	Pen tool
L	Laser pointer
Z	Undo last stroke
C	Clear ink on this slide
Esc	Drop the tool → close overview

Bluetooth presenter remotes emit Page Up / Page Down, so they work out of the box.

Project layout

File	Responsibility
main.swift	AppKit bootstrap
AppDelegate.swift	Windows, screen placement, menu, keyboard
PresentationState.swift	Shared state (index, timer, blackout, overview, thumbnails)
PDFModel.swift	Loads the PDF and crops each page into halves
TexNotes.swift	Parses \note{} from a sibling .tex (+ .nav page ranges)
PDFPageView.swift	Renders one non-interactive page (SwiftUI ↔ PDFKit)
SlideView.swift	Aspect-correct slide + ink/laser annotation layer
Whiteboard.swift	Whiteboard model, items, and QR-code generation
WhiteboardView.swift	Board rendering, item editing, toolbar, and PDF export
RecentFiles.swift	Recently-opened list persisted in UserDefaults
Favorites.swift	Favorite folders + app version info, persisted in UserDefaults
Stats.swift	Usage stats (count / total / average) for the dashboard
Dependencies.swift	Startup check for a LaTeX install (optional)
WelcomeView.swift	Home screen: open, drag-and-drop, browse folder, favorites, recents
SettingsView.swift	Settings window (start-screen folder, black-screen options)
SplashView.swift	Brief launch splash with icon + version
PresenterView.swift	Root switch + presenter console + control bar
ThumbnailStrip.swift	Clickable thumbnail navigation row
OverviewGrid.swift	Full-window slide overview overlay
AudienceView.swift	Full-bleed slide for the projector

Build a real .app

swift run is for iterating. To get a double-clickable bundle, run the included script — it builds a release arm64 binary, generates the app icon, and wraps everything with Info.plist:

./build-app.sh
open build/BeamerPresenter.app

To codesign for distribution, pass your Developer ID:

./build-app.sh "Developer ID Application: Your Name (TEAMID)"

Then notarize with xcrun notarytool submit build/BeamerPresenter.app --wait … and xcrun stapler staple. (You can also drop these sources into a regular Xcode macOS App target if you prefer the Xcode toolchain.)

App icon

The icon is drawn programmatically — no design tools or binaries needed. Edit the shapes/colours in Tools/make_icon.py and run:

./make-icon.sh

It renders Resources/AppIcon.iconset (and a 1024px Resources/AppIcon.png preview), then, on macOS, compiles Resources/BeamerPresenter.icns with the built-in iconutil. build-app.sh does this automatically when assembling the bundle.

Roadmap ideas

• Embedded links and videos in the PDF
• Persisting ink between sessions / exporting an annotated PDF
• Larger / scrollable / markdown notes via the pdfpc embedded-notes format
• Per-slide timing and a rehearsal mode
• Notarized release build