Solutions for presenting PDF slides with presenter notes on second display [closed]

I made a presentation using the latex beamer class with notes. Now I have a problem displaying notes only on my display while presenting the slides to the audience using a projector. Beamer notes produce very wide pdf pages, each half page should be presented on its own display. A single page looks somewhat like this:

Currently I use the smaller display of my notebook for notes and the larger display for the presentation in my test setting. The second screen is extending the desktop. The screen order doesn't really matter but both displays have a different resolution. I don't know what the actual resolution of the screen/projector will be for when presenting.

I've tried way to many things and should probably just print the notes (and also finish my presentation first before worrying about this at all). Most application support full screen viewing, but it always applies to only a single display.

I tried window modes but don't get the desired results because of the different resolutions. Either parts of the slides aren't visible or too much of the desktop can be seen. There are also distracting borders.

Here are some applications I've tried. I the got fullscreen/window issues as described above if not otherwise explained.

• Adobe reader X
• Foxit reader
• PDF-XChange Viewer
• evince
  • single display fullscreen, task bar still visible
• impressive
  • impressive
  • single display fullscreen
  • window mode: large resolution not supported by graphic card (only about 3/4 of both monitors)
• PDF presenter
  • most promising, if I extract all notes into text files
  • plain text notes, too small, would need zoom tool
  • no keyboard shortcuts, must click button
• Open-PDF-Presenter
  • similiar to above one, notes in text files (?) couldn't compile on windows yet.
• PDF presenter
• PDF presenter (yeah, it's a popular name)
  • somewhat promising; displays fullscreen on one screen while other screen is in window mode
  • notes are more a whiteboard feature, can't be hidden to audience
  • notes cant be saved

I also tried the default Ubuntu pdf viewer using virtual box. Unfortunately virtual full screen also shows only a single display.

Are there any solutions to display pdf slides in fullscreen on one display and notes about the current slide on another display?

You can achieve this under Linux with a combination of xrandr and impressive.py.

First use xrandr to set the screens' resolutions, e.g.:

xrandr --output LVDS --mode 1024x768 --output CRT1 --mode 1024x768 --left-of LVDS

where LVDS would be your laptop's screen and CRT1 the projector. You can verify your device identifiers and available resolutions by just running xrandr.

Once you have the screens set up, run impressive.py with the -g flag signalling the complete workspace size, e.g.:

impressive.py -g 2048x768 beamer_with_notes.pdf

Source: Phillip Merensky's blog.

Merensky's blog also points to a more complex example of xrandr usage for multiple-projector presentations.