Serengeti
LaTeX slides meet
interactive figures.
Serengeti brings interactive JavaScript plots to your LaTeX presentations and bakes them into a single PDF. Write in our online editor, then present with our free desktop app.
↻ Rotate the plot on the laptop — the projector follows.
“We talked a lot about expressive power in programming languages. We did not talk enough about expressive power in the context of scientific presentation. Here at Serengeti, we decided to do something about it.”
Serengeti is more than just LaTeX.
With Serengeti, the cross platform consistency of time tested tools like LaTeX and the Portable Document Format (PDF) meets the expressive power of JavaScript plotting libraries, a union that greatly improves the expressive power of scientific presentation.
Our desktop app is a dedicated “presenter mode” for PDFs.
We bust the myth that PDF is not a presentation format. Academics have since long stuck with LaTeX Beamer for making scientific presentations. Academics don't flock to LaTeX Beamer for no reason. LaTeX and the PDF format are known for their quality and consistency across platforms. With some things taken care of, PDF is the presentation format.
We keep the PDF's "portability" promise too.
We bake the JavaScript plots into your PDF, which you can open and present using our desktop app. Your PDF file is self sufficient for presentation, with no external dependencies.
Serengeti meticulously handles what open source PDF viewers typically don’t.
While PDFs don't typically support animations (e.g. bullet point unrolling), Beamer mimics them through multiple PDF pages. Most PDF viewers count each one as a separate slide. The proper fix is Beamer's handout mode. Keep a handout copy next to your talk, and Serengeti shows each slide once in your slide deck, just like PowerPoint, while the bullets still unroll for your audience. Your speaker notes can also accompany the presentation file, as a plain text.
Our online editor is an absolute pleasure to work with.
Serengeti online editor is based on Lumino, the same visual engine that powers JupyterLab. A wizard will help you set up your document or presentation using the right paper size or aspect ratio, page numbering, and typography. The editor supports a fair degree of customization (e.g. movable tabs) to meet personal preferences.
Our documents are versioned, for backward compatibility.
If your subscription runs out, we do not hold your documents as hostage. You own your documents and presentations. As we keep making Serengeti better and better, we ensure that you can always open your presentations (even if created using an earlier version of Serengeti) using the Serengeti Desktop app.
Our desktop app is free, and will always be.
Yes, even if your PDF presentation was made using something other than Serengeti.
Present your next talk from a PDF.
Serengeti Desktop is free, and it opens any PDF presentation.
Requires macOS 13 or later.