Pympress

What is Pympress?

Pympress is a free, open-source PDF presentation tool that turns two screens into a presenter console. It is written in Python on top of GTK and the Poppler PDF rendering library, and runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Where standard slideshow apps force your notes onto the same screen as the talk, Pympress mirrors a presenter view (current slide, next slide, speaker notes, timer) onto one display while the audience display sees only the current slide.

Key features

• Dual-screen presenter console: a configurable viewer window for the audience and a presenter window with current/next slide, notes, elapsed time, and clock.
• Beamer & LibreOffice notes pages: automatically renders LaTeX Beamer speaker notes and LibreOffice notes pages onto the presenter display even when the source PDF was not authored with the alternative screen layout in mind.
• Embedded media: displays embedded GIFs in PDFs out of the box; embedded video and audio play via VLC or GStreamer integration.
• Text annotations shown on the presenter side without leaking onto the audience window.
• Highly configurable: per-display screen selection, font sizes, slide layout, fullscreen vs. windowed, hotkeys.

Comparison to paid PDF software

Pympress is not a general PDF viewer like Adobe Acrobat or Foxit Reader, but is a more focused alternative for anyone who currently relies on Adobe Acrobat for dual-screen presentations, or who pays for PDF Expert simply to get a separate presenter display. As a focused single-purpose tool it is small (a few hundred KB of dependencies), launches in a second on most machines, and runs on platforms where no polished presenter-mode alternative exists. Because Pympress reads any PDF as a deck, no proprietary .pptx export is required.