Turning a PDF into slides for a hearing

Sometimes the document needs to be on a screen in a room rather than in a lever arch file. Converting to slides is the quickest route — with one caveat worth knowing before you present.

When a deck is the right format

Chronologies, mediation position papers and opening presentations are usually assembled as slides because they are shown, not read. If the material already exists as a paginated PDF, converting it page-for-page keeps the numbering aligned with the hard copy everyone else has.

For a hearing where the judge is following a bundle, having the same page on screen and on paper is worth more than any amount of slide design.

What the conversion produces

Each PDF page becomes one slide, and the slide is sized to the page, so a landscape plan becomes a landscape slide. Text on the slide is an image: it cannot be retyped, restyled or animated, and it will not reflow.

That is the right trade for showing a document as it is. It is the wrong tool for building a deck from scratch — for that, type the content into PowerPoint and paste the document pages in as pictures.

Check before you present

Rendered at 150 DPI, a full A4 page on a projector is readable but not comfortable: the audience reads headings, not body text. If the room needs to read a paragraph, crop to the relevant section first, then convert. And check the deck on the actual machine — fonts are irrelevant here because the slide is an image, but aspect ratio is not.

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