PDF can work really well. Prevents transitions and less worries about compatibility on the presenting machine.

Except it's difficult/impossible to edit a PDF file. How would you handle the use-case where multiple authors are collaborating on a single powerpoint file?

Plus, PDFs can be generated from Powerpoint.

The real key would be for some App to codify good presentation rules and target OOXML output. I'm not talking Keynote - It needs to be more focused and opinionated, and make that part easier.

Is that even possible? Would Microsoft permit it to exist?

> Except it's difficult/impossible to edit a PDF file. How would you handle the use-case where multiple authors are collaborating on a single powerpoint file?

You generate your PDF presentation from LaTeX, which is stored in git! Multiple simultaneous editors with sane merging, unlike a group of people editing a PPT file on the network drive.

But those are probably not the PDF presenters you're talking about.

So you're really talking bout LaTeX, not PDF then. PDF is a publishing format, not a collaboration format.

Now you run into the WYSIWYG issue, where the collaboration format needs to be "printed" in order to see the output.

Is there a WYSIWIG collaboration tool for LaTeX over git?

I believe Overleaf offers this service. I haven't dealt with it myself, but I have friends who like it a lot.

Sure. But if we're talking about using a PDF as "slides" like bhartzer mentioned, it's always going to be made somewhere else and published. Unless they draw the entire thing out of annotations in Acrobat.

Which I can now imagine someone doing. Gross.

ShareLaTeX is even Online.

I've had great results with LaTeX but it's not for non-technical people.

PDF would not be the main format but it works well to export to that from powerpoint (or whatever) before presentation.

Google Slides program does a good job at multi-user support. I usually export it to PDF on a thumbdrive just in case I don't have internet where I'm at and can't hook up my own computer.

Wish it had ooxml support.

magicpoint

So that includes the vast majority of people who don't/can't/won't use it well.