pdfpc

About

pdfpc is a GTK based presentation viewer application 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
  

• On Fedora:

  sudo dnf install pdfpc
  

• On archlinux:

  sudo pacman -S pdfpc
  

• On Windows 10 (with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)):

  Install:
  1. Windows: Activate WSL: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_guide
  2. Windows: Open CMD and run: 'bash' in order to start the WSL-bash
  3. WSL-Bash: run: 'sudo apt-get install pdf-presenter-console'
  
  Run:
  1. Windows: Install a Windows X-Server like VcXsrv: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv
  2. Windows: Make the presentation screen your secondary screen and disable the taskbar on that screen
  3. Windows: Start the X-Server with: 'vcxsrv -nodecoration -screen 0 @1 -screen 1 @2 +xinerama'
  4. Windows: Open CMD and run: 'bash' in order to start the WSL-bash
  5. WSL-Bash: run: 'DISPLAY=:0 pdfpc <your PDF file>' to open your presentation with pdfpc
  

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
• pangocairo

On Ubuntu systems, you can install these dependencies with:

sudo apt-get install cmake valac libgee-0.8-dev libpoppler-glib-dev libgtk-3-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev

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 on Windows

First a cygwin installation with the following dependencies is needed:

• cmake
• automake
• make
• gcc
• gcc-c++
• libstdc++-4.8-dev
• x11

For pdfpc the following compile time dependencies are necessary:

• vala
• gtk
• gee
• libpoppler
• gstreamer
• libgstinterfaces1.0-devel (has gstreamer.audio included)

Compiling in Mac OS X (Yosemite)

First, install homebrew as described on their webpage, then install the dependencies:

brew install cmake vala gtk+3 libgee poppler librsvg libcroco

You need to call cmake with:

cmake -DMOVIES=off

since Yosemite has no X11 implementation, and the movie playback uses X11 features.

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

FAQ

Embedded video playback is not working.

You likely have a gstreamer codec issue. Try loading the video file you want to play with the following command: gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=<your video> ! decodebin ! autovideosink If the video plays, go ahead and submit an issue. Otherwise, the command will likely output some good hints for why gstreamer cannot decode the video.

Windows do not appear on the correct screen.

For tiling window managers, the movement and fullscreening of the windows do not work reliable. It is therefore important to tell your WM to force floating the pdfpc windows.

If you are using i3-wm add this to your config file:

for_window [ title="^pdfpc - present" ] border none floating enable

Acknowledgements

pdfpc has been developed by Jakob Westhoff, David Vilar, Robert Schroll, Andreas Bilke, Andy Barry, Phillip Berndt 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