Frequently Asked Questions

I have a multi-monitor setup and Impressive never comes up on the correct monitor. What can I do?

Unfortunately PyGame, the windowing API currently used by Impressive, does not contain any support for multi-monitor setups whatsoever. This means that you can't really tell Impressive on with monitor it shall run – at least not directly. Starting from version 0.10.4, Impressive has options that make it possible to use some kind of »manual« multi-screen support. In particular, the so-called »fake fullscreen« mode (which is basically windowed mode, but without a frame and title bar around the window) is instrumental to this.

Imagine you have a two-monitor setup: The primary monitor is 1600x900, the secondary monitor is 1024x768 and logically located right of the primary one. To run a presentation on the secondary monitor, you can try the following: impressive -ff -g 1024x768+1600+0 This runs Impressive in a borderless window, at the position and size of the second screen.

Is there any kind of »presenter screen« in Impressive?

No, and there is currently no proper way (or plans) to implement such a thing. This is due to limitations in PyGame and Impressive's code structure, both of which are hard to overcome.

That being said, there is a feature called »half-screen mode« (command line option -H) that does implement a presenter screen, but it depends on three factors:

• The two screen have identical resolutions, and the presenter screen is on the right.
• Impresive is run with a large resolution that spans both screens.
• The slides already contain the presenter screen's contents on the right side. The only authoring tool (that I know of) capable of doing this is LaTeX's beamer package with the directive \setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right} in the header.
• The slide contents themselves should have the same or a wider aspect ratio than the screens, otherwise they won't be centered properly.

I get a lot of font-related warnings. Is anything wrong?

On Windows, Xpdf seems to print the following two messages for every page rendered: Error: No display font for 'Symbol' Error: No display font for 'ZapfDingbats' As far as I see, there's no problem with that, so you can safely ignore these errors. If there are really missing characters or something like that, you may try GhostScript-based rendering instead. To check if it helps, install GhostScript on your system and use the -P switch to point to the installed gswin32c.exe (Windows) or gs (Unix) executable.

My presentation contains videos, but Impressive fails to play them. How can I make them work?

You can't. Impressive is not able to extract videos from PDF files, let alone play them in a small window inside the page at the proper position and size. The only way to get video in Impressive is by using the 'video' page property, and even then it's important to know that this is an experimental feature that shouldnt't be relied on.