Speaker notes

[Eirikfesker]

Hi, I really enjoy using this plugin for creating presentations.
I'd like to suggest a feature: Would it be possible to add a dedicated speaker notes view? The idea would be to display markdown-formatted notes on the presenter's monitor while showing the presentation on a second monitor.
It would also be helpful to include:

An overview grid showing all slides at once
A slide list in a sidebar for quick navigation

Thanks for considering this, and for all your work on this excellent plugin! Donations incoming.

[Developer-Mike]

Thank you for sharing your idea and considering donating 😊. The presentation feature is one of my favourite features of AC so improvements are always cool.

How would you implement the speaker notes? I thought about a frontmatter property linking to another canvas file and if the file is open, it syncs with the presentation canvas. But this would require you to have the same edge/navigation setup in the presentation canvas as well as in the speaker notes canvas (especially for complex presentations) which can be tedious.

The overview grid and the slide list are more difficult to implement and need some more details on how it should be implemented.

[Eirikfesker]

I suggest creating separate notes for each slide and storing them in a dedicated folder. Add an 'Add Speaker Notes' button to each slide box in the top bar that automatically creates a note with the same name as the slide. When you rename a slide, the corresponding note name should update automatically (and maybe auto-resync when you change a note-name manually). During presentation mode, display the speaker notes in a bottom frame (similar to PowerPoint) while preserving your preferred Markdown format, with the slide overview shown in a left pane. For enhanced functionality, all panes should be closeable, dockable, and resizable. The preview could be implemented by generating small thumbnails of the slides and displaying them as images within a CSS flexbox or grid layout. Each thumbnail could include a hyperlink with an custom Obsidian command to navigate directly to the desired slide. What do you think?

OFC not everything at once. The thumbnails are just a nice to have. but maybe start with an easy 2-pane slide+note layout?

[Developer-Mike]

Sorry for the late reply @Eirikfesker. I always forget about discussions. I've added a pinned discussion so that feature requests and bug reports should be created as an issue instead.

The thumbnails and sidebar are probably out of scope currently. But I'll keep them in mind. The speaker notes feature sounds feasible though. I would propose a frontmatter property called e.g. speaker-notes that links to one markdown file. In this file you can create multiple H1 that have a link to the specific node as heading. Adding a new property to each node object as you proposed would in my opinion unnecessarily pollute the file format.

You may want to create two FRs for the speaker notes and the sidebar with thumbnails (they can just refer to this discussion) so that it won't be forgotten again.