pdfpc

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.

More information, including screenshots and a demo presentation, can be found at https://pdfpc.github.io/

Installation

• On Ubuntu or Debian systems:

  sudo apt-get install pdf-presenter-console

• Compiling from source
• Compiling from github

Sample presentations

• Simple demo
• Embedded movies

Try it out:

pdfpc pdfpc-demo.pdf

Compile and install

Requirements

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

• CMake Version >=2.6
• vala >= 0.26
• GTK+ >= 3.10
• gee 0.8
• poppler with glib bindings
• gstreamer 1.0

On Ubuntu systems, you can install these dependencies with:

sudo apt-get install cmake libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgee-0.8-dev librsvg2-dev libpoppler-glib-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev valac

and you should consider installing all the available gstreamer codecs:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-*

Compiling from source tarballs

You can download the latest stable release of pdfpc in the release section of github (https://github.com/pdfpc/pdfpc/releases). Uncompress the tarball (we use v4.0.2 as an example here):

tar xvf pdfpc-4.0.2.tar.gz

Change to the extracted directory:

cd pdfpc-4.0.2

Compile and install:

mkdir build/
cd build/
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 ..

By default, pdfpc includes support for movie playback. This requires several gstreamer dependencies as well as gdk-x11. The requirement for these packages can be removed by compiling without support for movie playback by passing -DMOVIES=OFF to the cmake command.

Compiling from github

If you want the bleeding-edge version of pdfpc, you should checkout the git repository. The master branch should be fairly stable and safe to use.

The pdfpc source can be retrieved from github:

git clone git://github.com/pdfpc/pdfpc.git

After it has been transfered you need to switch to the pdfpc directory, which has just been created.

You are now set to compile and install pdfpc. Start by creating a build directory (this is optional but it keeps the directories clean, in case you want to do some changes):

mkdir build/
cd build/

After you are inside the build directory create the needed Makefiles using CMake:

cmake ..

If you have put your build directory elsewhere on your system adapt the path above accordingly. You need to provide CMake with the pdfpc directory as created by git. As pointed out before, you may alter the installation directories via the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX and -DSYSCONFDIR command line arguments.

If all requirements are met, CMake will tell you that it created all the necessary build files for you. If any of the requirements were not met you will be informed of it to provide the necessary files or install the appropriate packages.

The next step is to compile and install pdfpc using GNU Make or any other make derivative you may have installed. Simply issue the following command to start building the application:

make
sudo make install

Congratulations you just installed pdfpc on your system.

Compiling Trouble Shooting

Some distributions do not have a valac executable. Instead they ship with a version suffix like valac-0.28. If cmake can not find your compiler you can try running cmake with:

cmake -DVALA_EXECUTABLE:NAMES=valac-0.28 ..

Usage

Now download some [sample presentations](#sample-presentations) and load them up:

pdfpc pdfpc-demo.pdf

Acknowledgements

pdfpc has been developed by Jakob Westhoff, David Vilar, Robert Schroll, Andreas Bilke, Andy Barry, and others. It was previously available at https://github.com/davvil/pdfpc

pdfpc is a fork of Pdf Presenter Console by Jakob Westhoff, available at https://github.com/jakobwesthoff/Pdf-Presenter-Console