Apple - What PDF Viewer can be used to present slides on High Sierra?

Just a few days ago I have asked the same question at tex.stackexchange.com. User DG‘ has provided a couple of useful suggestions, which culminated in the following answer:

The delay in rendering pdfs with preview.app can be avoided with the following apps (they are all available through homebrew):

  • Présentation.app: brew cask install presentation
  • pdfpc: brew install pdfpc
  • xpdf: brew install xpdf

Additional Remarks by Daniel

  • For those who prefer MacPorts: Currently MacPorts provides only the X11 versions, which do not work well for presenting full-screen mode. The homebrew variants are native. You can install them without doing any harm on your MacPorts setup.
  • The graphical Présentation.app and the console-based pdfpc assume a dual-screen setup and provide a presenter display with the next slide, elapsed time and so on. Both internally pre-render the PDF pages. Depending on the complexity of the slides (transparencies have quite an impact), this may take a while. However, the presentation output is superb.
  • Apparently, xpdf does not do pre-rendering. While it is fast in general, switching to a new slide causes flicker.

You might also want to check out SlidePilot.

Disclaimer: I am the developer of the app

The app is my interpretation of what presenting PDFs should look like on the Mac. I wanted the same superb presenter experience you have with Keynote but all the existing apps couldn't fulfill my needs. That's why I developed SlidePilot with a lot of additional features like broadcasting the cursor to the presentation screen (without having to turn your head) or covering the screen.

Feel free and take a look at the website and the docs, where all features are described in detail.

SlidePilot Screenshot