Beamer presentations on the MacBook with iRedLite

2008-08-22

I prefer to prepare my presentations in LaTeX with Beamer. The resulting pdf files are nice and portable, and Adobe Reader is actually not bad for doing presentations.

With the summer tour comming up, I figured it was time to find out how to use the little remote that came with my MacBook for controlling Adobe Reader. A little googling made it clear that the answer is iRedLite as featured on Lifehacker and Wired. Julián Villegas’ has a set of Adobe Reader actions on his blog.

Process wasn’t quite click-and-go (not for me at least) so here are the details:

  1. Grab and install iRedLite
  2. Get the file acrobatreader.irla from Julián Villegas’
  3. Fire up iRedLite and create your own Acrobat Reader layer:
    1. Edit -> create a new layer
    2. Enable “Expert mode” (triangle)
    3. Import the Acrobat Reader actions from acrobatreader.irla
    4. Set up the keys as you prefer with the actions now available