User-defined layout configurations

[Toorero]

If I'm in the highlighter-mode, I want my notes.

There are generally two options to choose from I guess:

1. Show the notes as in the notes view and put the controls of the highlighter at the side or bottom as for now. Perhaps with the ability to draw in the small current-slide window.
2. Show the notes in small in similar fashion as the next- and current-slide.

I think the second option is preferable for people with tablets that want to draw on the presenter screen, but I have a common two monitor-desktop setup and can easily draw on the presenting screen, so I would prefer the first option.

This is my current note-view:

but as soon as I switch to the highlighter-mode, my note-view is completly gone:

I tried to fix it by editing the layout, but I can't find any way select and add non-present items to the highlighter-mode list.

[Cimbali]

There is some tuning that can be done from the Starting Configuration > Edit layout menu, but currently you can’t add a notes view to the highlight mode.

I think the highlighting widget needs to be made a bit more first-class as it seems more used than I anticipated. Ideally there should be 2 highlighting layouts: highlight, and highlight + notes. That’s a bit of work though, so it won’t happen right away.

---

However, while it is not well tested to add a notes view to the highlighting mode, it can be done by modifying the config file. The feature is documented in the Layouts section of the docs.

Roughly:

1. Find the path to the pympress config file (in Help > About)
2. Close pympress
3. Make a backup of your config (because unfortunately an incorrect config may still crash pympress)
4. Find the highlight entry in the [layout] section (instead of the "notes" entry as in the docs)
5. Add "notes" to a "children" list, and add a number to its sibling "proportions" list (if there is one, i.e. if "resizeable" is true). For example:

   highlight = {
         "resizeable": true,
         "proportions": [
             0.6,
             0.2,
             0.2
         ],
         "orientation": "horizontal",
         "children": [
             "highlight",
             "next",
             "notes"
         ]
     }

6. Save and close the config
7. Open pympress, enable highlight mode
8. Use the Starting Configuration > Edit layout menu to modify the layout while looking at it. You can drag-and-drop widgets etc. and the "notes" widget will now appear in the list.

[Cimbali]

In fact I wonder if we could extend the editing dialog configuration to allow for

1. adding and removing widgets, and
2. adding entirely new user-specified configurations. That way users could even have presets for different configurations altogether, e.g. highlight with notes, highlight without notes, highlight with note pages libreoffice-style, for screens with a given aspect ratio, different formats of slides, etc etc.

The only tricky thing is to determine what happens when you click the “notes” or “highlight” actions. Maybe we could simply have them go to the pre-defined layouts? Possibly add configurable shortcuts for other layouts?

[Toorero]

Thanks for your quick and kind reply to my issue. I tried your approach and unsurprisingly it worked.

I quite like your idea of user-defined custom configurations. For now your "workaround" is fine.