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I've run into an unusual issue which involves fonts and various alternative systems - hear me out...

So I've been working on a PowerPoint presentation with a bunch of custom icon fonts and whatnot. Now I've got to switch back to my Linux system where PowerPoint doesn't run. So I tried the web version, which works but it doesn't recognise my system's fonts for some reason. LibreOffice Impress does, but the animations are janky and just generally not as clean as PowerPoint, which is dissapointing but predictable.

So my question was, in Word for instance, I can export the docoument as a PDF and it will with most certainty look exactly the same as the original document on just about any device or any viewer. My question is, is there a similar format for PowerPoints that preserves animations, and looks as clean as the original presentation, but can be opened outside of PowerPoint, such as a browser?

Thanks

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  • You could save the presentation as video.
    – harrymc
    Mar 26 at 11:51
  • I'd considered that, but then all my timings are fixed, which is not ideal. I was hoping that I could export to HTML but I don't seem to have much luck with that
    – J-Cake
    Mar 26 at 11:53
  • Best to present it on a Windows system. Borrow one for the presentation.
    – John
    Mar 26 at 11:59
  • Powerpoint has a large number of historical and alternative formats you could save as that might be better understood by alternative viewers: i.stack.imgur.com/RoJQs.png
    – Mokubai ♦
    Mar 26 at 11:59
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    By default, presentation saved as videos have one slide change each 5 seconds (you can change it). This is a rather stupid answer, but you can use the play/pause button of your video player to pass the slides (or its keyboard shortcut, typically the space bar). This is only useful if you can switch off any on screen message or symbol from the player.
    – krollspell
    Mar 26 at 12:36

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PDF has a little-known and not widely used presentation transition system. I don't know whether Powerpoint, when exporting to PDF, can generate these transitions, because I've never tried. Give it a go.

If not, you could export your PowerPoint as a PDF, and then re-add the transitions using cpdf:

https://www.coherentpdf.com/cpdfmanual/cpdfmanualch7.html#x11-690007

You might also set up some other things such as the Initial Page View. Here's a page from Adobe on the topic, including how to manually add transitions to a PDF:

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/using/setting-pdfs-presentation.html

Transitions only play in Adobe Reader when you're in full screen mode.

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  • Oh wow that's amazing. I didn't know that existed in PDF. It does seem like either PowerPoint doesn't export animations, or Chrome's built-in PDF renderer doesn't support it, which is a shame, but cool anyway
    – J-Cake
    Mar 26 at 15:23
  • Correct. PPT doesn't export media, animations, transitions, ActiveX/OLE objects etc to PDF using its own File | Save As feature and as far as I know, no other PDF add-ins (Acrobat etc) do either. Partially because some of this stuff just isn't supported in PDF, partially because ... well, they just don't.
    – Steve Rindsberg
    Mar 26 at 15:56

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