Presenting

Open a built deck's HTML file or its development-server address in a modern browser. Right-click, long-press, or use the menu button in the top right corner to find the presentation controls and their keyboard shortcuts.

Navigation

Right, Down, and Space reveal the next step. Left, Up, and Shift+Space go back. After the last step, advancing moves to the next slide; going back from the first step returns to the previous slide.

Page Down and Page Up move between slides, showing the steps last shown on each one. Home goes to the first slide, and End to the last step of the last slide. Shift+Home and Shift+End go to the first or last step of the current slide. Press G or : to jump to a slide by number.

Mouse and touch

Click a slide or scroll down to advance. Shift+click or scrolling up goes back. If a text field is focused or text is selected, a click dismisses that first.

On a touch screen:

• Tap to advance to the next step.
• Tap the left quarter of the slide, or the margin to its left, to go back.
• Swipe to change slides.
• Pinch to open the slide overview.
• Long-press to open the menu.

Interactive content

Buttons, text fields, and other interactive components handle their own input. Keys used by a focused field stay with that field. Press Escape to move the focus away so the navigation keys control the deck again.

Press S, or choose Text selection from the menu, to select and copy text with the mouse instead of changing steps by clicking. Press S again to return to click navigation.

Overview and table of contents

Press O to see the deck as thumbnails. Select a slide to go to it. With the keyboard, use the arrow keys to select a thumbnail and Enter to open it; Up and Down jump between sections. Escape closes the overview without leaving your current slide.

Press T to open the table of contents, or Shift+T to show the steps of the current slide. Use these to jump to a topic or a particular step. Spare slides, which ordinary navigation skips, can be reached through the overview, table of contents, or slide-number dialog.

Presenter view

Press Shift+P, or choose Presenter view from the menu. A separate window shows the slides to the audience. Your original window shows:

• The current slide, which you can interact with.
• Previews of the next step and slide; clicking a preview advances.
• Your presenter notes.
• A toolbar with the elapsed time and the current time.

Press N to focus on the notes, hiding the previews, or to show them again. Press R to reset the elapsed time.

Interactive components share their state between the presenter and audience windows, so you can operate a demonstration while the audience watches it. Clicks on the notes select their text instead of changing steps.

Full screen and screens

Press P, or choose Start presentation, to enter full screen. In a Chromium-based browser with several screens, Seminar can ask which screen should show the slides. You can also open the presenter view and move the audience window to the screen you want to use.

To present without the permission prompts of the browser, run npm run present in a project created with npm create seminar, or npx seminar present, which builds the presentation, and asks which one if there are several. It quits once you stop presenting. It also shows the slides on the screen you choose on Wayland, where browsers can't, if the compositor supports it, like Sway, COSMIC, KDE Plasma, or GNOME with the Window Calls extension. See the @seminar/cli package.

Press P again to stop presenting. Shift+P toggles the presenter view.

Show your pointer

In the presenter view, press M to show your pointer to the audience. The audience sees its shape, hovered and focused controls, and text caret and selection. Press L to switch between an ordinary pointer and a laser pointer.

Set mirrorPointer: true in the deck's frontmatter to start with pointer mirroring enabled.

Slide and deck state

Choose Reset slide in the menu to restore the current slide's shared state and return to the first step of its range.

Reset deck starts the deck over: it clears all deck and slide state, including transient values, resets every slide and recap to the first step of its own range, and shows the first non-spare slide of the deck.

Printing

Choose Print… in the menu, or press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on macOS), to print the deck. To get a PDF, choose to save as PDF in the print dialog of the browser. The Layout decides what goes on each sheet:

• Slides: each slide on a sheet as large as the slide.
• Slide with notes: each slide across a portrait sheet, with the presenter notes of the slide below it, as a handout.
• Several slides per sheet: 2 or 6 slides on a portrait sheet, or 4 on a landscape one.

For the handouts, choose the paper, like A4 or Letter, in the print dialog of the browser: the slides fit its width. Browsers that can't fit them, like some versions of Firefox, print them at the width of A4 or Letter instead.

Handouts have the title of the deck, its authors, event, and date at the top of each sheet, and the number of the sheet at the bottom, instead of the header and footer of the browser. Turn off Headers and footers to leave them out.

Slides with steps are split into pages by default, so that everything they show is on some page. Choose A page for every step to print each step instead. Turn on Include spare slides to print spare slides, too, where they are in the deck.

Saving PDFs

In a project created with npm create seminar, run npm run pdf to build the presentation and save the PDFs you chose during setup, like dist/index.pdf for the slides and dist/index-notes.pdf for a handout with notes. Slides are split into pages like when printing, PDF viewers show the numbers of the slides as page numbers, and the outline of the PDF is the table of contents of the deck.

The first time, npm run pdf downloads the browser that saves the PDFs, about 100 MB, which npm run present also uses.

To save other layouts, or to save PDFs in other projects, see the @seminar/cli package.

Interface language

If the deck offers several interface languages, choose Language in the menu to switch between them. This changes menus and tooltips, while the deck's content keeps its own language.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
Right, Down, Space	Next step
Left, Up, Shift+Space	Previous step
Page Down, Page Up	Next or previous slide
Home, End	First slide, last step of the last slide
Shift+Home, Shift+End	First or last step of the current slide
G or :	Go to a slide by number
O	Open or close the overview
T	Open or close the table of contents
Shift+T	Open or close the current slide's steps
P	Start or stop presenting in full screen
Shift+P	Open or close the presenter view
N	Toggle notes focus in the presenter view
M	Show or hide the pointer to the audience
L	Switch between ordinary and laser pointers
R	Reset elapsed time in the presenter view
S	Switch between text selection and click navigation
Ctrl+P	Print the deck
Escape	Unfocus, close the overview or presenter view