My slide deck tool ( rst2pdf ) produces PDFs, and I use pdfpc to present the PDF slides. It shows the current and next slides, my notes, a timer, and it probably does other things too that I don’t use! I’ve used it for years but it was really designed for “in real world” presenting with one or two screens. Recently I discovered it also supports some great options for remote presentations, but I had to look up how to do that so here are my notes (mostly in case I need to look it up 1 minute before I go on stage again!!).

The default modes:
f
* with only your laptop screen, pdfpc gives a full-screen presentation mode.
* with two screens, it assumes you and a projector, with the slides presented on the second screen and the speaker view on the laptop. This is ideal for being at a conference with a computer connected to the projector.

To present with a projector but with the screens mirrored (so you can demo):

• use pdfpc -s -S in combination – you can’t get the speaker view (because the audience would see it too), but now we can correctly display the presentation only.

There’s a new (or I didn’t notice it before) windowed mode which is great for streaming, or those fun situations where you are in a room but you connect to a digital meeting room for broadcast instead of to a monitor!

• by default, only the presenter mode is windowed
• use pdfpc -w both to put both presentation and presenter options into windowed modes – this way you can share the presentation window with your meeting and then move the presenter view around so you can see and present from that.

As a final note, please consider installing a PDF presenter tool (either this one or something else). Every slide deck program can export slides with embedded fonts and speaker notes to PDF, and if someone has a laptop with PDF presentation tools on it then the speaker can still go ahead and do their thing.