The Apple Files

As promised, here is the second installment of our Keynote Secrets post from a few days ago! This post will deal with Keynotes ability to work natively with PDF files.

PDF Handling in Keynote

The second feature of Keynote is its ability to accept PDF documents when placed on a slide (PowerPoint first converts the PDF to an image file resulting in a major loss in quality). This is particularly useful if you have L^AT_EX installed when combined with a freeware program called L^AT_EXiT. As illustrated on the L^AT_EXiT homepage, you can quickly typeset equations and then drag-and-drop them in PDF form on a slide. Part of the beauty of this is that the resulting equation can be scaled to huge proportions, rotated and have shadow applied from within Keynote and still maintain excellent image quality. The image below of a Keynote slide illustrates this (click for a larger version).

Furthermore, if you have a PDF document from which you wish to display a particular part, you can open the PDF in Preview.app and use the copy selection tool and paste into Keynote. Again, the beauty here is that you can scale the PDF snippet and zoom in on the interesting parts without losing image quality!

Keep a look out for our next L^AT_EX (on OSX) related post, we shall expand upon the use of the freeware application L^AT_EXiT and the other Apple iWork application, Pages…