pdfPresentation
This software is no longer maintained. A good replacement for Linux, which does everything pdfPresentation did and more is pdfpc.
pdfPresentation is a simple tool for Linux to display presentations written in the PDF format (in particular, presentations written with LaTeX). It is one of my oldest projects, which I wrote when I started playing around with beamer (a LaTeX class for writing presentations), back in 2010, and I've used it for every presentation I've given since then, until I found out about pdfpc in 2016. It was originally written for Mac OS X, in objective-C and using the Cocoa API, and rewritten in C++ for the Qt toolchain when I switched to Linux.
pdfPresentation does not have many features, but those it does have are quite useful, and I haven't found a PDF reader that implements them so far.
- While displaying one slide on the projector screen, pdfPresentation shows the next slide on the computer screen.
- A progress bar is displayed on the computer screen, to inform the speaker of how much time has elapsed since the beginning of his/her talk, and how much time is left.
- In cases in which the page number does not coincide with the slide number (e.g. when using overlays in beamer), pdfPresentation can skip from one slide to the next without going through every intermediate page.
Download
pdfPresentation is made available under an Apache 2.0 license, which allows copying, sharing and modifying the source code, among other things. Details can be found at https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.
The source code is made available here:
- Source tarball: pdfPresentation-2.0.2.tar.gz
- Git repository: pdfPresentation-git
In addition, the following distribution-dependent packages are made available:
- Arch linux: PKGBUILD
- Debian and Debian-like (including Linux Mint and Ubuntu) pre-compiled 64-bit (amd64) binary: .deb file
Licensing
As was mentionned earlier, pdfPresentation is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses the Qt toolchain, which is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License 3.0, and the poppler library, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License 3.0.
Mac OS X
Since pdfPresentation is written using the Qt toolchain, it is, at least in principle, portable. I have managed to compile pdfPresentation on a mac (on OSX 10.9, using Homebrew to install qt4 and poppler), but I have not been able to test the multi-screen setup.