The best way to present your PDF slides
Have you ever wondered what ingredients make an excellent presentation? Maybe the list below is incomplete, but for sure the most important requirements are mentioned.
- Firstly, you need a good plan for the presentation. Think of hooks to bind the audience’s attention, keep them on board by following a clear and logical structure that starts with an introduction outlining your talk and makes the audience curious. Don’t forget a convincing conclusion for your presentation to be remembered.
- Secondly, slides are needed that support the planned course of your presentation. You may need to show data to support your point, list facts or show some amusements to keep your talk balanced. Here, different communities use quite different software systems like Apple’s Keynote, Microsoft’s PowerPoint or LaTeX with the beamer class. Use which tool suits those needs best and which you are comfortable to work with.
- Thirdly, your presentation needs to follow you plan. You will be more convincing, the more you face the audience and the more you speak freely nevertheless using at the right point the right, perfectly formulated phrases that — for the sake of effect and the impression you give of yourself — should not already show up on your slides.
The third item is where pdfPresenter kicks in! For slides in PDF format it is still common to use Apple’s Preview or the Acrobat Reader for presenting. However, both aren’t designed as a presenting software and thus don’t offer any specific support for the speaker. Our app for the Macintosh allows to import slides in PDF format and extend them by hand written annotations, supporting your presentation but, like being written using magic ink, remaining invisible to the audience. That way, you can highlight details of a slide you should not forget to address or remind yourself of the perfect phrasing you thought over for minutes. Of course, there are means for textual notes and to use handwriting visible for the audience, too. For presentations in a teaching or scientific setting, the vertically scrollable writing surface that allows to extend the writing surface any slide without page breaks is worth mentioning.
If you got interested in pdfPresenter, keep reading here.