PDFCube is a tiny (<100KiB) program to render PDF presentations with special 3D effects. It adds eye-candy to your PDF presentations, even Latex, Beamer and Prosper ones. The main effect we see is to rotate a cube, like the Compiz effect, to turn the page and also includes the zoom to 5 predefined areas of the screen.
PDFCube will not change the content of our presentations in PDF but it will allow us to display it in a more attractive and interesting way for our audience. Just do not overdo the effect of rotating the cube because you can finish all dizzy.
PDF Cube uses Poppler and OpenGL APIs to add 3D spinning cube page transitions to PDF documents. The main focus of PDFCube is on quality of the animation (given some supported DRI hardware), speed and reliability.
You can install it from a Terminal ( Applications> Accessories> Terminal ) by running the following command:
sudo aptitude install pdfcube
To run it you just have to write the name of the program (pdfcube) followed by the PDF file you want to view.
pdfcube file.pdf
Once uoi see our PDF presentation with PDFCube you can use the following keys to control it (unfortunately the mouse does not work at all):
| Key | Function |
| c |
Go to the next page by rotating the cube |
| h, j, k, l, z | Zooms in predefined areas (each point corresponds to an area) |
| Space | Go to the next page with the schedule effect |
| Page Up, Page | Change page without effects |
| Esc | Exits the application |
If you want to see a demonstration of what it does, you can see the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0vhGq0JyNY&feature=related
The programs it’s a bit old (2009) but still working perfectly and usable in a boring presentation.
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Totally useless, using PDFCube more than 5 minutes will drive me crazy.
What is needed is a multi-tabbed PDF viewer. Better Search dialog. Remember last session. Remember Zoom factor (keeping user Zoom preference instead of the one imposed by the PDF).
In short, something similar to PDF-XChange Viewer v2.5. Unfortunately it only exists in Windows version. Its running fine in Wine. The only issue is the tearing effects when scrolling page down.