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Open PDFora

The honest part

A page does not move

That is the whole of it. Everything a deck loses on the way to a PDF, it loses for the same reason: a printed page cannot be played.

Motion and timing

A build that reveals four bullet points one at a time has nowhere to put the first three states. What lands in the PDF is the slide with all four showing — which is usually what you wanted in a handout, and never what you wanted in a rehearsal.

Transitions between slides go the same way, and so does anything set to advance by itself after a number of seconds.

Anything that depended on being clicked

If a slide only makes sense once something has been pressed, the still version of it has to make sense on its own. This is worth checking before you send rather than after: the two or three slides built around a reveal are the ones a reader will stare at and not follow.

What to do instead

Split the reveal across slides in the deck, so each state becomes its own page. It is more slides and less cleverness, and it reads properly when nobody is standing next to it narrating.

Where the file goes

This conversion is not one of the ones that runs inside your browser. The deck is sent to a conversion service, turned into pages there, and the result is held for sixty minutes before it is removed.

Worth knowing about the line between the two

  • Runs the page tools entirely in your browser: those files are never uploaded
  • Takes files up to 100 MB and up to 50 files in one task

So the page tools below behave differently from the conversion above: those files never leave the device they are on.

What you can still do to the pages

Once the deck is a PDF it stops being slides and starts being a document, which means the document tools apply to it.

Runs in the browser, on the file you already have

  • Add page numbers, so a reader can refer to slide eleven and be understood
  • Add a watermark, for a deck going out before it is final
  • Split it, when half the pages are for a different audience
  • Merge it with another document, to put an agenda in front of it
  • Delete or extract pages, to cut the slides that were only for you

None of those need the conversion service. They work on the pages directly, which is also why they are the ones that never upload anything.

Start with the conversionThe page tools come after