Impressive is a cross-platform tool to display presentations in a stylish way. The application supports PDF files or a folder containing images and besides beautiful slide transitions, Impressive features some useful presentation tools like: highlight boxes, which can be used to draw attention to a specific part of the slide, spotlight effect which is kind of like a highlight box but dynamic, and a screen overview which you can use to easily select a slide.
Impressive is highly customizable too, but unfortunately there's no GUI front-end (at least, that I know of). However, the default settings should be good enough for most people and to run it, all you have to do is open a terminal and type: "impressive /path/to/some_presentation.pdf" or "impressive /path/to/image/folder/" and the presentation should start.
Basic Impressive usage:
- Use left click to advance to a new slide and right click to go back to the previous slide (the arrow keys work too).
- To create a highlight box, draw a rectangle using your left mouse button:
- For a dynamic highlighting (spotlight effect), press the ENTER key - you can adjust its size using the mouse wheel:
- To zoom in/out, press the "z" key
- For an overview of all your slides, press TAB:
Impressive also comes with many command line options: you can configure the transitions, rotate pages, specify the window geometry, set the start page, change the duration and so on. To see all the available options, type:
impressive --helpYou can also check out the Impressive documentation online.
Here's quick video I've recorded, demoing Impressive:
(if the video doesn't show up, click here)
Download Impressive
Impressive is available in the Ubuntu repositories so if you use Ubuntu, simply click the button below to install it:
If you prefer to install Impressive from the command line, open a terminal and copy/paste the following command:
sudo apt-get install impressiveDownload Impressive source or Windows (portable) binaries download it via Sourceforge.
