Provided by: pympress_1.7.1-2_all 
NAME
pympress - pympress documentation
CONTENTS
What is Pympress?
Pympress is a PDF presentation tool designed for dual-screen setups such as presentations
and public talks. Highly configurable, fully-featured, and portable
It comes with many great features (more below):
• supports embedded gifs (out of the box), videos, and audios (with VLC or Gstreamer
integration)
• text annotations displayed in the presenter window
• natively supports beamer's notes on second screen, as well as Libreoffice notes pages!
Pympress is a free software, distributed under the terms of the GPL license (version 2 or,
at your option, any later version).
Pympress was originally created and maintained by Schnouki, on his repo.
Installing
• Ubuntu 20.04 focal or newer, Debian 11 Bullseye or newer (maintained by @mans0954)
apt-get install pympress libgtk-3-0 libpoppler-glib8 libcairo2 python3-gi python3-gi-cairo gobject-introspection libgirepository-1.0-1 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-poppler-0.18
• RPM-based Linux (Fedora, CentOS, Mageia, OpenSuse, RHEL)
You can get pympress from the pympress COPR repo of your system.
With yum or dnf, simply do:
dnf copr enable cimbali/pympress
dnf install python3-pympress
With zypper, fetch the link of the .repo in the table at the bottom of the COPR page and
add it as a source.
zypper addrepo https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/cimbali/pympress/repo/opensuse-tumbleweed/cimbali-pympress-opensuse-tumbleweed.repo
zypper install python3-pympress
• Arch Linux from AUR (maintained by @Jose1711)
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/python-pympress.git
cd python-pympress
makepkg -si
pacman -S poppler-glib # dependency temporarily missing from AUR package
Or using any other tool to manage AUR packages (yay, pacaur, etc.):
yay -S python-pympress
pacman -S poppler-glib # dependency temporarily missing from AUR package
• macOS using Homebrew
brew install pympress
• Windows with Chocolatey (maintained by @ComFreek)
choco install pympress
Or download the latest installer from the latest Github release.
• If you get an error message along the lines of "MSVCP100.dll is missing", get the
Visual C++ 2010 redistributables from Microsoft (x86 (32 bit) or x64 (64 bits)).
Those libraries really should already be installed on your system.
• Other systems, directly from PyPI − requires python, gtk+3, poppler, and their python
bindings:
python3 -m pip install "pympress"
• Make sure you have all the dependencies. (These are already included in binary
packages or their dependencies.)
• Using pip, you may want to install with the --user option, or install from github or
downloaded sources. See the python documentation on installing.
• If your python environment lacks the Gobject Introspections module, try
1. using --system-site-packages for virtual environments,
2. installing pygobject from pip (pip install pygobject, which requires the correct
development/header packages. See the PyPI installation instructions of PyGObject
for your system).
Notes
To support playing embedded videos in the PDFs, your system must have VLC installed (with
the same bitness as pympress). VLC is not distributed with pympress, but it is certainly
available in your system’s package manager and on their website.
Usage
Opening a file
Simply start Pympress and it will ask you what file you want to open. You can also start
pympress from the command line with a file to open like so: pympress slides.pdf or python3
-m pympress slides.pdf
Functionalities
All functionalities are available from the menus of the window with slide previews. Don't
be afraid to experiment with them!
Keyboard shortcuts are also listed in these menus. Some more usual shortcuts are often
available, for example Ctrl+L, and F11 also toggle fullscreen, though the main shortcut is
just F.
A few of the fancier functionalities are listed here:
• Two-screen display: See on your laptop or tablet display the current slide, the next
slide, the talk time and wall-clock time, and annotations (either PDF annotations,
beamer notes on second slide, or Libreoffice notes pages). The position of the beamer
or Libreoffice notes in the slide is detected automatically and can be overridden via a
menu option.
• Media support: supports playing video, audio, and gif files embedded in (or linked from)
the PDF file.
• Highlight mode: Allows one to draw freehand on the slide currently on screen.
• Go To Slide: To jump to a selected slide without flashing through the whole presentation
on the projector, press G or click the "current slide" box. Using J or clicking the
slide label will allow you to navigate slide labels instead of page numbers, useful e.g.
for multi-page slides from beamer \pause.
A spin box will appear, and you will be able to navigate through your slides in the
presenter window only by scrolling your mouse, with the Home/Up/Down/End keys, with the
+ and - buttons of the spin box, or simply by typing in the number of the slide. Press
Enter to validate going to the new slide or Esc to cancel.
• Software pointer: Clicking on the slide (in either window) while holding ctrl down will
display a software laser pointer on the slide. Or press L to permanently switch on the
laser pointer.
• Talk time breakdown: The Presentation > Timing Breakdown menu item displays a breakdown
of how much time was spent on each slide, with a hierarchical breakdown per
chapters/sections/etc. if available in the PDF.
• Automatic file reloading: If the file is modified, pympress will reload it (and preserve
the current slide, current time, etc.)
• Big button mode: Add big buttons (duh) for touch displays.
• Swap screens: If Pympress mixed up which screen is the projector and which is not, press
S
• Estimated talk time: Click the Time estimation box and set your planned talk duration.
The color will allow you to see at a glance how much time you have left.
• Adjust screen centering: If your slides' form factor doesn't fit the projectors' and you
don't want the slide centered in the window, use the "Screen Center" option in the
"Presentation" menu.
• Resize Current/Next slide: You can drag the bar between both slides on the Presenter
window to adjust their relative sizes to your liking.
• Preferences: Some of your choices are saved in a configuration file, and more options
are accessible there. See the configuration file documentation for more details.
• Caching: For efficiency, Pympress caches rendered pages (up to 200 by default). If this
is too memory consuming for you, you can change this number in the configuration file.
• Configurability: Layout of presenter window dynamically configurable, with 1 to 16 next
slides preview
• Editable PDF annotations: Annotations can be added, removed, or changed, and the
modified PDF files can be saved
• Automatic next slide and looping
Command line arguments
• -h, --help: Shows a list of all command line arguments.
• -t mm[:ss], --talk-time=mm[:ss]: The estimated (intended) talk time in minutes and
optionally seconds.
• -n position, --notes=position: Set the position of notes on the pdf page (none, left,
right, top, or bottom). Overrides the detection from the file.
• --log=level: Set level of verbosity in log file (DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR).
Media and autoplay
To enable media playback, you need to have either:
• Gstreamer installed (enabled by default), with plugins gstreamer-good/-bad/-ugly based
on which codecs you need, or
• VLC installed (and the python-vlc module), with enabled = on under the [vlc] section of
your config file.
To produce PDFs with media inclusion, the ideal method is to use beamer’s multimedia
package, always with \movie:
\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{multimedia}
\begin{frame}{Just a mp4 here}
\centering
\movie[width=0.3\textwidth]{\includegraphics[width=0.9\textwidth]{frame1.png}}{movie.mp4}
\movie[width=0.3\textwidth]{}{animation.gif}
\movie[width=0.3\textwidth]{}{ding.ogg}
\end{frame}
If you desire autoplay, ensure you have pympress ≥ 1.7.0 and poppler ≥ 21.04, and use the
movie15 package as follows:
\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{movie15}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\begin{center}
\includemovie[attach=false,autoplay,text={%
\includegraphics{files/mailto.png}%
}]{0.4\linewidth}{0.3\linewidth}{files/random.mpg}
\end{center}
\end{frame}
\end{document}
Dependencies
Pympress relies on:
• Python (version ≥ 3.4, python 2.7 is supported only until pympress 1.5.1, and 3.x < 3.4
until v1.6.4).
• Poppler, the PDF rendering library.
• Gtk+ 3, a toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces, and its dependencies,
specifically:
• Cairo (and python bindings for cairo), the graphics library which is used to
pre-render and draw over PDF pages.
• Gdk, a lower-level graphics library to handle icons.
• PyGi, the python bindings for Gtk+3. PyGi is also known as pygobject3, just pygobject or
python3-gi.
• Introspection bindings for poppler may be shipped separately, ensure you have those as
well (typelib-1_0-Poppler-0_18 on OpenSUSE, gir1.2-poppler-0.18 on Ubuntu)
• optionally VLC, to play videos (with the same bitness as Python) and the python-vlc
bindings.
• optionally Gstreamer to play videos (which is a Gtk library)
On linux platforms
The dependencies are often installed by default, or easily available through your package
or software manager. For example, on ubuntu, you can run the following as root to make
sure you have all the prerequisites assuming you use python3:
apt-get install python3 python3-pip libgtk-3-0 libpoppler-glib8 libcairo2 python3-gi python3-cairo python3-gi-cairo gobject-introspection libgirepository-1.0-1 libgirepository1.0-dev gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-poppler-0.18
Different distributions might have different package naming conventions, for example the
equivalent on OpenSUSE would be:
zypper install python3 python3-pip libgtk-3-0 libpoppler-glib8 libcairo2 python3-gobject python3-gobject-Gdk python3-cairo python3-gobject-cairo typelib-1_0-GdkPixbuf-2_0 typelib-1_0-Gtk-3_0 typelib-1_0-Poppler-0_18
On CentOS/RHEL/Fedora the dependencies would be:
yum install python36 python3-pip gtk3 poppler-glib cairo gdk-pixbuf2 python3-gobject python3-cairo
And on Arch Linux:
pacman -S --needed python python-pip gtk3 poppler cairo gobject-introspection poppler-glib python-gobject
On macOS
Dependencies can be installed using Homebrew:
brew install --only-dependencies pympress
On windows
The binary installer for windows comes with pympress and all its dependencies packaged.
Alternately, in order to install from pypi or from source on windows, there are two ways
to get the dependencies:
1. using MSYS2 (replace x86_64 with i686 if you're using a 32 bit machine).
Warning: this can take a substantial amount of disk size as it requires a full software
distribution and building platform.
pacman -S --needed mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk3 mingw-w64-x86_64-cairo mingw-w64-x86_64-poppler mingw-w64-x86_64-python3 mingw-w64-x86_64-vlc python3-pip mingw-w64-x86_64-python3-pip mingw-w64-x86_64-python3-gobject mingw-w64-x86_64-python3-cairo
This is also the strategy used to automate builds on appveyor.
2. Using PyGobjectWin32. Be sure to check the supported Python versions (up to 3.4 at the
time of writing), they appear in the FEATURES list in the linked page.
• Install native python for windows
• Get GTK+3, Poppler and their python bindings by executing the PyGi installer. Be sure
to tick all the necessary dependencies in the installer (Poppler, Cairo, Gdk-Pixbuf).
Alternately, you can build your Gtk+3 stack from source using MSVC, see the Gnome wiki and
this python script that compiles the whole Gtk+3 stack. This strategy has not been used
successfully yet, due to problems building Poppler with its introspection bidings (i.e.
typelib) − see #109.
Contributing
Feel free to clone this repo and use it, modify it, redistribute it, etc, under the
GPLv2+. A number of contributors have taken part in the development of pympress and
submitted pull requests to improve it.
Be respectful of everyone and keep this community friendly, welcoming, and
harrasment-free. Abusive behaviour will not be tolerated, and can be reported by email at
me@cimba.li − wrongdoers may be permanently banned.
Pympress has inline sphinx documentation (Google style, contains rst syntax), and the docs
generated from it are hosted on the github pages of this repo.
Translations
• Czech
• French
• German
• Polish
• Spanish
• Italian
If you want to add or contribute to a translation, check pympress’ page on POEditor and
add your efforts to make pympress available in your own language to those of @Vulpeculus,
@polaksta, @susobaco, Agnieszka, Ferdinand Fichtner, FriedrichFröbel, Jaroslav Svoboda,
Jeertmans, Kristýna, Lorenzo. pacchiardi, Luis Sibaja, Nico, Saulpierotti, and Cimbali.
Packages
Official releases are made to PyPI and with github releases. The community maintains a
number of other packages or recipes to install pympress (see Install section). Any
additions welcome.
Configuration file
Pympress has a number of options available from its configuration file.
This file is usually located in:
• ~/.config/pympress on Linux,
• %APPDATA%/pympress.ini on Windows,
• ~/Library/Preferences/pympress on macOS,
• in the top-level of the pympress install directory for portable installations.
The path to the currently used configuration file can be checked in the Help > About
information window.
Shortcuts
The shortcuts are parsed using Gtk.accelerator_parse():
The format looks like “<Control>a” or “<Shift><Alt>F1” or “<Release>z” (the last one is
for key release).
The parser is fairly liberal and allows lower or upper case, and also abbreviations
such as “<Ctl>” and “<Ctrl>”. Key names are parsed using Gdk.keyval_from_name(). For
character keys the name is not the symbol, but the lowercase name, e.g. one would use
“<Ctrl>minus” instead of “<Ctrl>-”.
This means that any value in this list of key constants is valid (removing the initial
Gdk.KEY_ part). You can verify that this value is parsed correctly from the Help >
Shortcuts information window.
Layouts
The panes (current slide, next slide, notes, annotations, etc.) can be rearranged
arbitrarily by setting the entries of the layout section in the configuration file. Here
are a couple examples of layouts, with Cu the current slide, No the notes half of the
slide, Nx the next slide:
• All-horizontal layout:
+----+----+----+
| Cu | No | Nx |
+----+----+----+
Setting:
notes = {"children": ["current", "notes", "next"], "proportions": [0.33, 0.33, 0.33], "orientation": "horizontal", "resizeable": true}
• All-vertical layout:
+----+
| Cu |
+----+
| No |
+----+
| Nx |
+----+
Setting:
notes = {"children": ["current", "notes", "next"], "proportions": [0.33, 0.33, 0.33], "orientation": "vertical", "resizeable": true}
• Vertical layout with horizontally divided top pane:
+----+----+
| Cu | No |
+----+----+
| Nx |
+---------+
Setting:
notes = {"children": [
{"children": ["current", "notes"], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "horizontal", "resizeable": true},
"next"
], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "vertical", "resizeable": true}
• Horizontal layout with horizontally divided right pane:
+----+----+
| | Nx |
+ Cu +----+
| | No |
+---------+
Setting:
notes = {"children": [
"current",
{"children": ["next", "notes"], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "vertical", "resizeable": true}
], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "horizontal", "resizeable": true}
And so on. You can play with the items, their nesting, their order, and the orientation in
which a set of widgets appears.
For each entry the widgets (strings that are leaves of "children" nodes in this
representation) must be:
• for notes: "current", "notes", "next"
• for plain: "current", "next" and "annotations" (the annotations widget is toggled with
the A key by default)
• for highlight: same as plain with "highlight" instead of "current"
A few further remarks:
• If you set "resizeable" to false, the panes won’t be resizeable dynamically with a
handle in the middle
• "proportions" are normalized, and saved on exit if you resize panes during the
execution. If you set them to 4 and 1, the panes will be 4 / (4 + 1) = 20% and 1 / (4 +
1) = 100%, so the ini will contain something like 0.2 and 0.8 after executing pympress.
Themes on Windows
Pympress uses the default Gtk theme of your system, which makes it easy to change on many
OSs either globally via your Gtk preferences or per application. Here’s the way to do it
on windows:
1. Install a theme
There are 2 locations, either install the theme for all your gtk apps, e.g. in
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\themes, or just for pympress, so in
%INSTALLDIR%\share\themes (for me that’s
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Programs\pympress\share\themes)
Basically pick a theme e.g. from this list of dark themes and make sure to unpack it in
the selected directory, it needs at least %THEMENAME%\gtk-3.0\gtk.css and
%THEMENAME%\index.theme, where THEMENAME is the name of the theme.
There are 2 pitfalls to be aware of, to properly install a theme:
• themes that are not self-contained (relying on re-using css from default linux themes
that you might not have), and
• linux links (files under gtk-3.0/ that point to a directory above and that need to be
replaced by a directory containing the contents of the target directory that has the
same name as the link file).
2. Set the theme as default
Create a settings.ini file, either under C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\gtk-3.0
(global setting) or %INSTALLDIR%\etc\gtk-3.0 (just pympress) and set the contents:
[Settings]
gtk-theme-name=THEMENAME
In testing this found these 2 stackoverflow questions useful:
• Change GTK+3 look on Windows which contains a list of all interesting directories
• How to get native windows decorations on GTK3 on Windows 7+ and MSYS2 which details the
process
Pympress package
This page contains the inline documentation, generated from the code using sphinx.
The code is documented in the source using the Google style for docstrings. Sphinx has
gathered a set of examples which serves as a better crash course than the full style
reference.
Retructured text (rst) can be used inside the comments and docstrings.
Modules
INDICES AND TABLES
• Index
• Module Index
AUTHOR
Thomas Jost, Cimbali
COPYRIGHT
2009-2022, Thomas Jost; 2015-2020 Cimbali