14 DAY TRIAL // When it comes to creating presentations PDF is definitely not the first choice as there are plenty of applications designed with this specific purpose in mind. PDFrizator on the other hand manages to create slideshows and store them as PDF files, viewable with Adobe Reader.
It is a free application that requires little effort to install and does not pose any sort of trouble during this process. The interface is not designed to look good, but to be functional and intuitive, with dockable panels that can be pinned out of the original frame.
The program makes available its own file browser that allows you to navigate anywhere on the disk in the same easy fashion as Windows Explorer. A surprising option is the possibility to search for items on the Internet straight from the file browser. Thus your possibilities for the presentation are no longer limited to local content as you can also appeal to online resources.
On the downside, we noticed that navigating for local content with PDFrizator’s own browser is not of much help. In our case the app kept on crashing the moment we tried to add an image to the presentation via drag and drop. Double-clicking on the items would actually do the job. Unfortunately, adding items this way is pretty time consuming because you add the elements one by one.
A faster way to add multiple items to the presentation is to select them in your default file browser and drag them straight to the main application window. You can move the images (BMP, GIF, PNG, JPG and TIF) around so that they follow a specific order. Additional files supported are PDF, CBR (RAR archived comic book file) and CBZ (ZIP archived comic book file).
If you choose to get your material from the Internet, PDFrizator makes available several repositories you can search for your photos: Google or Bing images, Picasa, Flickr and TwitPic. Search options at your hand include picking the size, the predominant color of the image, style (face, clipart, line drawing) and type. The displayed results can be easily incorporated in the presentation by adding them to the project from the right-click menu (multiple selection is supported in this case).
The Page Editor allows you to zoom in and out of the selected page as well as crop an area that is more relevant for your purposes. However, the page view in the interface is of extremely poor quality.
Just as with any presentation or slideshow creator, you can add an audio track to play in the background (MP3, WMA, MIDI and WAV). This is adjusted from the side panel in the right part of the application window, under the general options of the document by turning presentation mode on.
For selecting the background music a similar file browser is available for the local files and you also have the chance to pick data online. The web repository available is SoundCloud and the search can be adjusted to show only files with a specific license (Public Domain or the various Creative Commons Attribution choices).
Listening to the tracks before adding them to the project is also possible. On the downside, you cannot add more than one track to the project.
PDFrizator does not make available a wide range of transition effects due to the restrictions imposed by the PDF file type, but you configure it to randomly alternate the 15 choices it provides. The uncomfortable part when selecting the effect is that you do not benefit from a preview (except for the entire document). On the upside, you can decide on the transition for each page individually if you want.
Additional options at hand include orientation of the selected page, media size, display duration of the image and duration of the effect. Moreover, the app features the possibility to rotate content (90, 180 or 270 degrees) and de-skewing the page.
The time required to convert everything to PDF format depends entirely on the number of the pages that need to be processed. During the process the system is not drained of resources. During our tests the CPU rose to around 50%, while RAM consumption was between totally acceptable parameters, peaking at about 20MB.
Working with PDFrizator is not as comfortable as one would think judging by the simple looks of the interface. Crashing when trying to add images using its own file browser also makes working with it a bit cumbersome.
It lets you assign a different transition effect for each page of the presentation or you can automatically apply one to all the pages. Additionally, there is the possibility to configure it to instruct the PDF reader to assign a random effect for each transition. Web search is available for both visual material as well as audio. You do not benefit from a preview of the available effects unless you choose to view the entire document in advance. Also, it does not support multiple tracks in a project. It is free of charge and comes with its own set of shortcomings and flaws. But it is very good if you want to quickly create a slideshow. Note: Starting version 0.6.0.21 PDFrizator no longer crashes during "drag and drop" procedure from its file browser. The application can also be installed in portable mode, an option we missed during our initial testing.
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