Many modern laptops are capable of multiple monitor support. With Opus this lets you run a presentation on one monitor or through a projector whilst reading our notes and prompts from the screen of your laptop.
The exact solution you would use for your presentation would depend on what you wanted to control and how and what you are presenting but there folllows an example.
The presentation you design in Opus would have at least two chapters. One would be the control chapter which displayed your notes and any other control buttons such as muting the sound or running another application. The other would contain the pages of your presentation itself.
The Control/Autocue chapter would be set the default monitor, whilst the presentation is output to monitor 1 which is the monitor or projector attached to the additional monitor output on your laptop.
The exact way in which you present the notes in the control/autocue presentation would depend on personal preference and the requirements of the situation - a face to face sales meeting would need different notes presented differently to a presentation in a large hall where you might be some distance from the computer.
For an autocue style presentation you would need the text to be large enough to read from a distance and so you would need to display the text in sections using the Display in sections option on the Text tab of the Properties dialog. You might prefer to scroll through the text as on a genuine autocue which you could set up using a Ticker trigger and the Scroll actions in the Text category. However this is would have to be timed to your presentation exactly and would need a pause option designed if you were interrupted.
The simplest way to marry notes with pages is to create the same number of pages for the autocue as for the presentation and move through them consistently. If you want to include other controls these can be placed on a master page so they are available on each page.
To step through the notes and the presentation in a consistent and synchronised manner you will need to set up the triggers which would normally take you backward and forward through the presentation to take both sections backward and forward. This means setting a keyboard trigger and/or mouse click to change a variable for going forward and another for going backward. The actions in the different sections are then both controlled by a Variable Changed trigger which watches the same variable. This is simple to achieve as follows:
In your control publication select the page and add a trigger for each of the events you want to make the presentation move forward. In most cases this is pressing the Space keyboard trigger or the Left Mouse Click trigger. Add these triggers to the actions for the page. Then select Set Variable from the Variables category of the Programming tab.
Use the New button to create a new number variable called GoForward with zero as the starting value.
Returning to the Set Variable dialog you can then set the GoForward variable to 1.
On each page of the presentation section you should add a Variable Changed trigger and set it to watch the GoForward trigger. Then apply a Go to Page <Forward> action for this trigger.
If you use a master page for your publication you can set this trigger and action on the master page.
On each page of your control publication you can do exactly the same thing and the pages of notes will change consistently with the publication.
Repeat the process with the Backspace key and the Right Mouse triggers to set a GoBack variable and use the Go to Page<Previous> action to move back through your presentation.
As you become more familiar with Opus you will find you can create even more sophisticated variations. For example, if you want to move through the presentation in a non-linear way you could use the variables to store the number of the page you want to go to. The Variable Changed trigger would then have to check the current page number and run a Go to Page action for that specific page.
This would be best achieved by using Select Case from the Programming tab. The Select would consider the GoForward or GoBack variable and each case would be one of the possible page numbers. The individual Case would then contain a simple Go to Page action set to the relevant page.