Xpdf is a pretty good alternative to Adobe's Acrobat Reader. It has at least two advantages over Acrobat Reader:
It is particularly lightweight -- it starts up noticeably faster -- therefore repeated invocations are pretty painless.
It can re-load the current document. This is very useful during the development of Beamer slides. You can start up Xpdf on your document and put it in the background. Then as you edit your source file and update the resulting pdf file, you can update the display by typing "r" key in the Xpdf window. No need to exit and restart.
Xpdf's disadvantages are:
It is limited to platforms with the X Window System, It is does not run on Microsoft Windows. Therefore it is not as widely available as Adobe's Acrobat Reader. You just can't expect to walk up to a computer in a conference and expect to find Xpdf installed on it.
It is not possible to toggle between window mode and the full-screen
mode in Xpdf. For full-screen mode, you need to start Xpdf with the
-fullscreen option. See below for details.
There are some rough edges, literally, in certain elements displayed by Xpdf. Generally Adobe's Acrobat Reader produces a nicer looking output.
For these reasons, I use Xpdf while building a presentation and use the Acrobat Reader for presenting my slides to an audience.
To display the file small.pdf, do:
xpdf small.pdf
Navigate among your slides using the following key bindings:
| Next slide | n or SpaceBar or PageDown |
| Previous slide | p or BackSpace or PageUp |
| Last slide | Control-End |
| First slide | Control-Home |
| Previous viewed slide | b |
| Re-load file | r |
| Quit | q |
Remark: The "Previous viewed slide" was explained in the Acrobat Reader usage.
Remark: To get a complete list of Xpdf's key binding, click the question-mark button that appears along Xpdf window's bottom edge.
To display the file small.pdf in the full-screen mode, do:
xpdf -fullscreen small.pdf
Navigate among the slides with the same key binding that were described in the previous paragraph.
Start up Xpdf with a command like "xpdf small.pdf" then
resize the window using whatever hooks your window manager provides.
You will find out that the contents of the window remain at the original size -- they do not resize along with the window.
To tell Xpdf to resize the contents along with the window, invoke it as:
xpdf -z page small.pdf
This is pretty handy while you are developing your slides: you can use your window manager's "maximize" function to toggle between normal and maximized states to get a better view of the slides.
I see no reason for not using the -z page flag all of the time.
Therefore I have aliased xpdf to "xpdf -z page"
and I recommend
that you do it too. How you define an alias depends on the unix
shell that
you use. At UMBC's Department of Mathematics and Statistics we use
tcsh. Therefore edit the file .cshrc in your home directory
and add the following line to it:
alias xpdf xpdf -z page
While you are editing your .cshrc, you might as well add the following
lines:
alias xpdff xpdf -fullscreen
complete xpdff 'n/*/f:*.{pdf,PDF}/'
The first of these lines sets xpdff to be a an alias for
"pdf -fullscreen", therefore you can now start a full-screen
presentation by typing "xpdff small.pdf".
The second line tells tcsh that the newly created xpdff
command expects files names ending in pdf or PDF.
This is used when you hit the TAB key to complete a file name on the command
line.
Xpdf is bundled with most Linux distributions. If for some reason you need to download, compile and install the package yourself, you can get the source from: http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/.