So, you have tens or hundreds of presentations and you would like to present them from your iPad. You could use Keynote for iPad, if your presentations are in Keynote form. But what do you do if they’re in PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Freelance, StarOffice, Symphony or LaTeX?
StrawberryCat PDF Presenter is the software I wrote to address this. If you can convert the slides to PDF format (one slide per page, landscape) you can present them from your iPad. There’s more information and screenshots on the StrawberryCat site.
Keynote, OpenOffice, StarOffice, Symphony and LaTeX have built-in PDF-creation functionality; however for PowerPoint and Freelance a different approach is needed. What you need is a printer driver that generates PDFs rather than printing the document. If you’re using a Mac there’s a PDF printer built-in (look in the bottom-left of the print dialog); on Windows you need to install one, there are many available.
Once you have a PDF printer installed, it helps to configure a custom paper size. You can use A4 or US Letter in landscape but they are not quite the same shape as a projected screen, so you will inevitably get a white border on at least one side of your slides. If you create a custom paper size of 260x195mm and use that instead the result is a PDF of the right shape; it’s also smaller than both A4 and US Letter so it should still be possible to print it.
The other important thing to remember is to print right to the edges of the paper. Some applications might call this “full bleed”; in others it’s simply a matter of setting all the margins to zero.
Once you’ve got the PDF made, simply drag and drop it into the file sharing part of iTunes to sync it to your iPad.