[OS X TeX] Previewing PDF with movie/aniations

[David Goldenberg]

> Happy New Year!
> 
> Is Adobe Acrobat the only option for displaying a PDF with multimedia? I am using Beamer+multimedia /animate to embed movies or animated gifs. Acrobat gives a silly hand for a cursor and no laser pointer or other annotation tools that would be useful during presentation. I would consider payware if the options are right. If it could work on the iPad, even better.
> 
> Themis


Themis,
   Until recently, I used Adobe Reader, in the full screen mode, for making beamer presentations. But, with the shift to Zoom, I have found Reader to be rather awkward. My solution has been to use this utility for converting pdfs to keynote presentations:
https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/freesoftware/pdftokeynote.html

What it does is to create a keynote presentation with each page of the pdf placed in a slide. I find that it works very well. Among other things, the keynote slides are very quick to load and do not show the lag that pdfkit apps (including TexShop and Skim) do, with an initial fuzzy image appearing before the sharp image does.

Movies embedded in pdfs do not get included into the keynote slides, but they can be easily dragged in. I would still like to embed movies in pdfs, for the versions that I post for my students, but doing this continues to be a poorly supported option in LaTeX, so far as I can tell.

David Goldenberg
--
School of Biological Sciences
University of Utah
257 South 1400 East
Salt Lake City, UT  84112-0840

Telephone: (801) 581-3885
Fax:  (801) 581-2174

E-mail: goldenberg at biology.utah.edu
Web page: http://goldenberg.biology.utah.edu