Turn a PDF into a slideshow

Showing a PDF as a slideshow without converting it

A PDF already is a slideshow: fixed pages, one after another. Every serious viewer has a mode that shows a page full screen and moves on a key press, and a PDF as slideshow in that mode looks the same as the deck it came from.

• Preview on a Mac. View, Slideshow. Arrow keys move, Escape leaves.
• Acrobat Reader on any system. View, Full Screen Mode, or Control L. Edit, Preferences, Full Screen sets a timer for automatic advance and a loop.
• Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Open the PDF, press F11, set the page layout to single page. Firefox also has a Presentation Mode in its viewer menu.
• An iPad or iPhone. Open the PDF in Books, which pages with a swipe, or in Keynote, which imports a PDF as one image per slide and plays it with its own remote.
• A TV or a digital photo frame. These play images, not PDFs; the image route below covers it.

A PDF shown this way keeps the fonts and the layout exactly, because nothing is converted. What it lacks is transitions, builds and speaker notes on a second screen.

Turning the pages into images for a loop

A photo frame, a lobby screen, a TV's USB slideshow and most kiosk players take a folder of JPEG or PNG files and cycle through them. PDF to Images renders each page as one image, at 96 dpi by default with a DPI control for a sharper render. For a 1080p screen, a page rendered at 150 to 200 dpi is enough; a 4K screen wants 300. The images are numbered in page order, so the player shows them in sequence. This is also the way to turn PDF into slideshow form for a phone's photo album or a social post.

Getting a deck you can edit

When the slides need changes, a picture of each page is the wrong shape. Drop the PDF on PDF to PowerPoint. It writes one slide per page, keeps the text as editable text boxes at the positions it had, puts the images where they were, and reads the .pptx back to confirm the text count before the download. The tool runs in the browser tab, and the PDF is not sent anywhere.

The .pptx opens in PowerPoint, imports into Keynote, and goes into Google Slides through File, Import slides. Each of those apps then adds the transitions, builds and notes a PDF cannot hold. The PowerPoint details are in Convert PDF to PowerPoint, and the Google route in Convert PDF to Google Slides.

A scanned PDF

A scan holds pictures of pages and no text, so the PowerPoint conversion finds nothing to make editable and says so. Use the image route: one image per page, placed on a slide each, gives a deck that looks right and can be reordered even though the words cannot be retyped.

Which route to choose

• You present once, from your own laptop: full-screen mode in the viewer. No conversion.
• The screen plays images on a loop: PDF to Images, then copy the folder across.
• The slides need editing, or a colleague will present from their app: PDF to PowerPoint.
• The PDF is a scan: PDF to Images, one image per slide.

The full set of Office and presentation guides, including the exports back to PDF from PowerPoint, Keynote and Google Slides, is under PDF, Word and Excel help.