PDF Presenter
Minimal PDF presenter
What it does
A minimal, single-purpose presenter: open a PDF, get a presenter view on one screen — Now and Next preview plus a clickable slide thumbnail strip — and a clean fullscreen output on a second screen. No notes panel and no NDI — but OSC and a Companion module are in, because a button wall is how these get driven.
A stripped-down sibling of the Presentation Commander client, keeping only its proven pdf.js rendering pipeline and multi-window display-picker pattern.
It also ships as a hosted browser build, PDF Presenter Lite, which needs nothing installed: the same presenter view and output window in a tab, reading the PDF from your own disk and never uploading it. The Lite is the difference in capability — no OSC, no Companion, no watched folder, none of the desktop integrations — and nothing else, 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
Field proven, both builds — the desktop app and the hosted browser build have each been run on real events. Released at v1.7.1. v1.7.0 renders JPEG 2000 images instead of dropping them, makes the Now/Next split draggable, adds a dynamic transition direction that follows which way you are 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 smaller, with a second copy of pdf.js no longer packed into it. 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 of the hosted browser build. The macOS builds are signed and notarised by Apple and open normally; the Windows binaries are not code-signed, so SmartScreen warns once.
Watch it running
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