Please don’t do it.
Ok, now that I’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about PDF documents, why presenters like using them, and why AV techs don’t like them (and would much prefer that you use Powerpoint or Keynote).
The most common reason why people use PDF is that have a bunch of strange/unusual/expensive fonts in their presentation. In this case to use a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation would require these fonts to be sent to your AV tech along with the presentation so they can be installed on all presentation computers. However, with a PDF the fonts are included in the file and don’t need to be installed on the computer separately.
Sometimes graphic designers prefer PDF because it can maintain complicated designs regardless of the version of the software you use, but this is a very rare thing to go wrong. Usually the comment we get is “oh, I built it on a Mac so maybe that’s why it looks different”. But the cause of the issue is usually just that a font hasn’t been installed.
There are many potential problems with using PDF for presentations. First and foremost, if the presenter would like to change something at the last minute, too bad – we won’t be able to make any changes to the PDF document. If there are any little typos or problems with the order of the slides, you’ll have to live with them. The PDF document is locked down, so last minute changes will be almost impossible.
PDF also doesn’t allow any kind of “presenter view”, which means at the AV desk we won’t be able to see how many slides are left, or which slide number you’re up to. We won’t be able to “jump to the slide with the big pie chart” when asked, and will just have to manually move through the slides one by one until we find the pie chart.
Another slightly more technical issue with PDF is that for some simple AV systems it can require us to swap between “mirror mode” and “extended desktop” between presentations, which we can do…but would prefer not to. It’s things like this which increase the workload on the computer, the switching hardware and the AV operator, and all of this increases the chances of something going wrong.
We prefer for everything to go as smoothly as possible, so please use Powerpoint or Keynote for your presentations.
On behalf of all AV techs, thanks!
