PDF Presenter Lite

AI-assisted project. This codebase was created with Claude (Anthropic), directed and reviewed by a human author — including architecture, implementation, and documentation. Review it accordingly before relying on it in production.

A minimal, single-purpose presenter tool: open a PDF, get a presenter view on one screen (Now/Next preview plus a clickable slide thumbnail strip) and a clean fullscreen output on a second screen — no notes panel, no NDI, no network integrations. A stripped-down sibling of presentation-commander-client, keeping only its proven pdf.js rendering pipeline and multi-window/display-picker pattern.

Download

Prebuilt binaries are on the Releases page, covering both x64 and ARM64 on every platform — plus a combined "works on either architecture" option for macOS and Windows if you'd rather not think about which to pick:

• macOS: Universal (.dmg / .zip, runs on both Apple Silicon and Intel — recommended if unsure), or Apple Silicon-only / Intel-only for a smaller, single-architecture download. Unsigned, so Gatekeeper will block it on first launch. Right-click the app → Open, or run xattr -cr "PDF Presenter Lite.app" after extracting.
• Windows: a combined portable .exe covering both x64 and ARM64 (recommended if unsure), or an x64-only / ARM64-only build for a smaller download. No installer either way, just run it directly. Unsigned, so SmartScreen will likely warn on first run ("More info" → "Run anyway").
• Linux: x64 or ARM64 (no combined option — .deb/.rpm packages are inherently single-architecture), as .deb (Debian/Ubuntu) or .rpm (Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE).

What it does

• Open a PDF — renders locally with pdf.js, no other slide-source integrations
• Presenter view — a "Now" and "Next" preview side by side, plus a horizontal strip of thumbnails for every slide below them; click any thumbnail to jump straight to that slide
• Keyboard navigation — Left/Right, Up/Down, and Page Up/Page Down all move a slide; Space also advances
• Mouse navigation — a Previous/Next transport bar below the thumbnail strip, and clicking the "Next" preview itself jumps straight to it
• Internal PDF link navigation — links authored into the PDF itself (a table of contents, "back to agenda" links exported from PowerPoint/Keynote/ Google Slides) become clickable on the "Now" slide, jumping straight to their target page. Reads link annotations via pdf.js, resolving each destination to a page number regardless of whether it's a named or explicit destination; only internal same-document links are wired up, external URLs are left alone
• Fullscreen Output window — a second, chrome-free window showing just the current slide, for a projector or confidence monitor. Pick which connected display it opens on from a dropdown next to the toggle button
• Screen blanking — press B or W to cut the Output window to solid black or white without losing your place, mirroring PowerPoint's presenter shortcuts; press again to restore the slide
• Hide cursor on Output — an optional checkbox that hides the OS mouse cursor whenever it's over the Output window, for a clean audience-facing display

Architecture

Two renderer views loaded from the same bundle, selected by a mode query param (mirrors the Client Node's Program Out window pattern):

• App.tsx — the presenter view: loads the PDF, owns currentPage/totalPages, renders Now/Next + thumbnails, and pushes { data, currentPage } to the Output window whenever it changes.
• Output.tsx — the fullscreen window. Pulls the current state via output:get-state once its own listener is mounted (rather than relying solely on a live push, which can race and get silently dropped if the window is still loading when the presenter pushes) and then stays in sync via output:state pushes for as long as it's open.

pdf.ts (the PDF loading/rendering helpers) is copied verbatim from presentation-commander-client — same render-queue-per-canvas serialization to avoid the transform-corruption bug documented there.

Status

Built and verified end-to-end: opening a PDF, thumbnail-click navigation, arrow-key navigation, and the fullscreen Output window (including a real race condition in the initial state hand-off, found and fixed during testing) all confirmed working against a real multi-page PDF.

Project Setup

Install

npm install

Development

npm run dev

Build

npm run build
npm run build:mac   # or build:win / build:linux