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pdfpc

A presenter console with multi-monitor support for PDF files.

About

pdfpc is a GTK based presentation viewer application for GNU/Linux which uses Keynote like multi-monitor output to provide meta information to the speaker during the presentation. It is able to show a normal presentation window on one screen, while showing a more sophisticated overview on the other one providing information like a picture of the next slide, as well as the left over time till the end of the presentation. The input files processed by pdfpc are PDF documents, which can be created using nearly any of today's presentation software.

Screenshots

Presenter view, showing the current and next slides, remaining time, notes and some additional information.

Overview mode showing all the slides in the presentation

Features

The most relevant features of pdfpc are:

Shows current and next slides
Support for (textual) notes
Support for overlays (e.g. as generated by the beamer LaTeX package)
Timer or countdown showing remaining time in the presentation
Overview mode for quick switching between slides
Freezing and turning off the presentation view
Customizable keybindings, enabling support for different presenter devices

See the man page for more details.

To get a better feeling of pdfpc, install it, download the demo presentation and start it with

pdfpc pdfpc-demo.pdf

News

July 2012: pdfpc 3.1.1 released (bugfix release)
June 2012: pdfpc 3.1 released
May 2012: pdfpc 3.0 released

Getting pdfpc

Compiling from source

In order to compile and run pdfpc the following requirements need to be met:

CMake Version >=2.6
Gtk+ 2.x
libPoppler with glib bindings
librsvg

Compile and install

Download pdfpc-3.1.1.tgz. Uncompress the tarball (we use v3.1.1 as an example here)

tar xvf pdfpc-3.1.1.tgz

Change to the extracted directory::

cd pdfpc-3.1.1

Compile and install::

cmake .
make
sudo make install

If there are no errors in the process, you just installed pdfpc on your system. Congratulations! If there were errors, they are probably due to missing dependencies. Please check that you have all the necessary libraries (in some distributions you may have to install *-devel packages).

Note: You may alter the final installation prefix in the cmake call. By default the pdfpc files will be installed under /usr/local/. If you want to change that, for example to be installed under /usr/, with config files under /etc/ you may specify another installation prefix as follows:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DSYSCONFDIR=/etc .

Alternatives

If you use Arch Linux, you can download the AUR package.

You can also get the bleeding-edge version from github (or AUR). For compiling the git version, follow the instructions given in the github page.

Config files

The keybindings of pdfpc can be customized by writing a config file, see the man page for details. For certain devices, like wireless presenters, configuration files are readily available:

Logitech wireless presenter
Bluetooth headest: you can use the "next song" and "previous song" buttons for navigating through the slides

If you have one of these devices, download the corresponding file and save it as ~/.pdfpcrc.

If you have a device not listed above and would like to contribute a config file, we will be happy to add it to this site.

Acknowledgements

pdfpc is a fork of pdf presenter console by Jakob Westhoff, extended with additional features.