I use rst2pdf to create presentations which provides me with a PDF file. When it comes to presenting on stage, on Linux there are tools such as and on Mac there’s. Keynote doesn’t read PDF files by default, so we have to convert them and the tool I use for this is Melissa O’Neill’s.

This is a GUI tool, so I manually create the Keynote file when I need it which is tedious. Recently, with Melissa’s prompting, I realised that I could automate the creation of the keynote file which makes life easier!

I use a Makefile for this and this is the target & relevant variables. Osascript -e 'tell application 'PDF to Keynote' to quit' The nice thing about PDF to Keynote is that it has preferences to automatically create the Keynote file after a PDF file opened and to automatically close the PDF file once saved. We can also programmatically set the aspect ratio.

Add homebrew package for mac. Documentation for the missing package manager for macOS. The suggested and easiest way to install Homebrew is on the homepage. The standard script. What Does Homebrew Do? Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn't. $ brew install wget. Homebrew installs packages to their own directory.

To do this, we use the defaults command line tool to set up PDF to Keynote the way that we want. We then call open -a to open PDF to Keynote with the PDF file as the argument which then automatically creates the Keynote file and stores it into the same directory. The PDF file is automatically closed for us too. Finally, we can use AppleScript via the osacript command to quite PDF to Keynote. I’m not sure if we need to wait for the conversion to happen before we quit, in which case, we can add sleep 3 if we need to. Automatically creating the Keynote file vastly improves my workflow and I no longer have to think so much about it.

Convert Pdf To Keynote Mac

Update: Note that I changed the default write commands for the booleans as they need to be 1 and 0, not “YES” and “NO” This article was posted on 30 March 2017 in.