PDF Presenter
A PDF presenter, and not much else
What it does
A small presenter that does one job. Open a PDF and you get a presenter view on one screen (Now and Next previews plus a strip of clickable slide thumbnails) and a clean fullscreen output on a second. There's no notes panel and no NDI, but OSC and a Companion module are in, because a wall of buttons is how these get driven.
It's a stripped-down sibling of the Presentation Commander client, keeping only the pdf.js rendering pipeline and multi-window display picker that had already proved themselves there.
There's also a hosted browser build, PDF Presenter Lite, which needs nothing installed: the same presenter view and output window in a tab, reading the PDF off your own disk and never uploading it. What Lite leaves out is the desktop integrations (OSC, Companion, the watched folder and the rest), and that's the only difference, since both builds share the whole UI.
- Now/Next presenter view with a clickable slide thumbnail strip
- Clean fullscreen output window with a display picker
- OSC control, with a Bitfocus Companion module
- Nine slide transitions on the output window — fade, dip to black or white, push, wipe, cover, uncover and zoom — settable over OSC, with a dynamic direction that follows the way you are moving through the deck
- Prebuilt binaries for x64 and ARM64 on every platform, plus combined universal builds for macOS and Windows
- A hosted browser build, PDF Presenter Lite, for a machine you cannot install on
- Screen blanking to black or white on B and W, without losing your place
- Internal PDF links clickable on the Now slide, so a deck's own table of contents works
- Laser pointer, timed auto-advance, and a watched folder that lets OSC open a deck by filename with no dialog
Where it stands
Used on real events, both builds: the desktop app and the hosted browser build have each been run on real events. Released at v1.7.2, with a hosted build that installs as an app and runs with no signal. v1.7.0 renders JPEG 2000 images instead of dropping them, makes the Now/Next split draggable, adds a transition direction that follows which way you're moving through the deck, ships a universal macOS build alongside the per-architecture ones, and puts the app in the Stoatworks Homebrew tap. v1.7.1 is the same app 33 MB lighter, now it isn't carrying a second copy of pdf.js around. Before that, v1.5.0 added slide transitions and fixed a white flash on every page change, and v1.4.0 renamed the desktop app to PDF Presenter, leaving Lite as the name for the hosted browser build. The macOS builds are signed and notarised by Apple and open normally. The Windows ones aren't code-signed, so SmartScreen will warn you once.
Watch it running
Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play.Watch it there instead