Presenter mode (speaking notes, no slides)

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

I’d like to use obsidian for presentation notes for presentations that don’t involve slides; basically just speaking notes (my use-case is speaking notes on iOS for portability).

Currently font-size changes in Appearance > Font Size affects the entire application, and Appearance > Quick font size adjustment doesn’t work at all on mobile (iOS at least) it seems. Either way, a separate mode would be preferable as I don’t want to affect editing or application-level font-size, this is solely for use during a presentation.

Proposed solution

Apple’s “Pages” app for iOS has, for me, an ideal implementation of this in its “Presenter Mode” – essentially just a “read-only” view with its own independent font-size slider (along with a default larger font for ease of presentation), and ability to auto-scroll (though I’d consider auto-scroll just a nice-to-have).

I’ve looked through community plugins and didn’t notice anything that could achieve this; I could have missed something though, so would love any ideas there. I haven’t looked into plugin development, but would consider creating a plugin for this if feasible and the core team isn’t interested in adding this (or it just isn’t a priority).

Current workaround (optional)

The only near-workaround is CSS hacks to slides to make the overflow content scrollable, but this doesn’t really cut it on mobile and means the document is split between slides by — which isn’t really ideal for this use-case.

CSS snippets aren’t really usable on mobile either per [Feature] Adding CSS Snippets to Obsidian Mobile

Related feature requests (optional)

Similar: Presentation mode to include 'slide down' feature

2

As a workaround you might use a separate app with the text size cranked up (optionally with a Shortcuts shortcut to send it there from Obsidian using the Shortcut Launcher plugin).

1 Like
3

I actually struck on something similar recently.

My thinking was that it should be possible to set up CSS snippets and/or themes to make a “presentation mode”, such that Obsidian could be used as the entire presentation software. This would be neat because you could use Obsidian’s entire plugin ecosystem to do some fancy things — plus custom JS — that most presentation software can’t handle.

If I ever get the chance to fiddle with this, my plan is to use Better Command Palette’s macros to switch to the presentation theme and toggle snippets to activate this mode.

1 Like