KeyJnote and a tale of two utils

For those who like the low key approach of PDF based presentation, KeyJnote is a very effective and slick way to present using a PDF. I’m not interested in arguing about the effectiveness of audio and transitions and fly-in etc. I just like simple and find it elegant and portable.

At any rate, my boss was using it and I was going to try it as well (I know there are other ways to do it …). So, since I also run Ubuntu, I figured it’s easy, but I ended up with KeyJnote presenting me with no presentation but instead ”pdftoppm produced an unreadable file”.

I tried a couple of things including running the pftoppm manually, with the same result. Some comparisons to my boss’ system lead to the following truth:

pdftoppm exists in two packages: poppler-utils and xpdf-utils

I had poppler-utils installed, while my boss had xpdf-utils on his box. The fix was simple ”’apt-get install xpdf-utils”’

That replaced the poppler package with the xpdf versions and voila, all was well.

\\@matthias

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