PDFTalk - PDF presentation tool

Pdf document viewer specialised for doing presentations with beamer. This has been heavily inspired by pdfpc, but built using Qt5. Key features :

• One window for public, one for presenter with additional information (slide numbering, timer, text annotations, next slide).
• Pdf render cache and prefect system, to enable very fast slide changes.
• Slide timing summary for training.

PdfTalk was initially developped to fit my use case : simple, fast, and tiling-window-manager-friendly. pdfpc has more features and is more actively supported.

Setup

Requirements to run pdftalk :

• Qt >= 5.3
• poppler library with Qt5 bindings

Installing libpoppler-qt5 on Debian/Ubuntu should be sufficient to run the precompiled binary in the release section.

Compilation from source requires a C++11 compiler and the header files for the required libraries. Steps :

qmake
make

Usage

Starting the presentation tool is simple:

pdftalk <pdf_document>

PdfTalk creates 2 windows : one for the spectators with the current slide, and one for the presenter with neighbouring slides, a timer, and slide numbering. The windows can be placed on the two screens (use s key to swap them), and can be made fullscreen (f key). Navigation is standard (→ ← space home end keys). The timer can be paused/resumed with p, and resetted with r.

A summary of slides timing can ge written to a file after the presentation using t. For each visited slide, it indicates when the slide was first reached, and the total time spent on the slide. The generated file is a simple text file containing a table of tab separated values.

The presenter window can show text annotations. It follows the old pdfpc model: a text file named <pdf_file_name>.pdfpc in the same directory as the pdf file. The text file can easily be generated using the pdfpc-latex-notes package. A copy can be found in test/.

Roadmap

FIXME annotation handling:

• pdfpc file format has changed over the years. Most recent seems to be JSON. related issue.
• there is a pdfpc.sty package in latex-extra. Seems to default to PDF internal annotations.
• revisit using pdf annotations ? pdfpc handling here. And/or old commit when I tried using them.

Some additional functionnality would be useful:

• Go to page/slide n
• Presentation slide overview mode ? Need to choose page sizes. Toggle with 'o' ? Could replace "go to n".

Maybe useful:

• Disable screensaver ; no standard way to do this.
• Spread windows on multiple screens on startup ?

Will not support:

• Support for durations (no animations for now)
• Support for Poppler Rotation flags (don't know when it matters)
• Movies
• Transitions / animations

License

PDFTalk - PDF presentation tool
Copyright (C) 2016 - 2022 Francois Gindraud

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.