Start the main instance

Speaker notes

Starting on version 0.10.0, presenterm allows presentations to define speaker notes. The way this works is:

• You start an instance of presenterm using the --publish-speaker-notes parameter. This will be the main instance in which you will present like you usually do.
• Another instance should be started using the --listen-speaker-notes parameter. This instance will only display speaker notes in the presentation and will automatically change slides whenever the main instance does so.

For example:

# Start the main instance
presenterm demo.md --publish-speaker-notes

# In another shell: start the speaker notes instance
presenterm demo.md --listen-speaker-notes

See the speaker notes example for more information.

Defining speaker notes

In order to define speaker notes you can use the speaker_notes comment command:

Normal text

<!-- speaker_note: this is a speaker note -->

More text

When running this two instance setup, the main one will show "normal text" and "more text", whereas the second one will only show "this is a speaker note" on that slide.

Multiline speaker notes

You can use multiline speaker notes by using the appropriate YAML syntax:

<!-- 
speaker_note: |
  something
  something else
-->

Multiple instances

On Linux and Windows, you can run multiple instances in publish mode and multiple instances in listen mode at the same time. Each instance will only listen to events for the presentation it was started on.

On Mac this is not supported and only a single listener can be used at a time.

Enabling publishing by default

You can use the speaker_notes.always_publish key in your config file to always publish speaker notes. This means you will only ever need to use --listen-speaker-notes and you will never need to use --publish-speaker-notes:

speaker_notes:
  always_publish: true

Internals

This uses UDP sockets on localhost to communicate between instances. The main instance sends events every time a slide is shown and the listener instances listen to them and displays the speaker notes for that specific slide.