I'm in need to create a responsive power-point like presentation that is landscape on desktop and portrait on mobile. PDF's could also work.
Which would be the best practice and is there a way to detect the device the presentation is being viewed on?
Powerpoint presentations and PDFs are preferred because the presentation needs to be downloadable.
There is no such thing as a "responsive" presentation. It simply does not exist.
There is no responsive PDF either. On the contrary, one objective of a PDF file is that you preserve the proportions of not only the document but also of the content. It is the opposite of responsive. It is fixed.
Make the presentation horizontal and a person holding a cellphone can simply rotate it.
Or simply make two versions of the presentation and let the mobile device user choose.
Another option is to make a web-based slider, it can be responsive to the orientation of the device. But that is not an easy task.
But probably it is better if you export the "presentation" to a video.
A PDF is a fixed layout intended to be seen as the creator wished it. However there could be an alternative approach or workaround with tagging, to reflow the content.
What is important to remember first is that the PDF houses a lot of "live" content, so to speak. That is the text, font file, the graphics can be all vector etc. In suitable PDF editors like Adobe DC, you can jump in edit, recolour, resize these and still get a clean look. You can even retype existing text. Now, I am not saying you should do that for this, as that would be a waste of your time, but it does lead me to tagging.
In a PDF, content can be tagged for improving accessiblely. In this case, reflowing a document. This means the reader reformats the flow of the document, and in some cases, the text size, usually into a single column. Useful if you have monitor set up in portrait or someone is trying to read it on a mobile device.
There are authoring softwares like Word, InDesgin etc that can do this from the start and some PDF editors can do this in post.
Now I ain't saying this is the solution to your problem but a potential work around if you have to use a PDF. There is a learning curve to it, you will prob be doing some back and forth testing it. You should be thinking ahead when building your doc and be certain there the readers been used can reflow content.
Referring back to my comment about what a PDF contains, keep what you can in a vector format, and use rasters when needed. This means when you reflow the document, you can have a little more control. The text can be resized as well to suit the device or reader more appropriately. If the text is rasterized, then you are stuck to what ever size image can scale to.
Reflowing a PDF wont make the document fully responsive but may be a workaround and free one too.
This is a solution I found https://readymag.com looks like you must use the systems online editor to create the content then you publish it. Looks like it has basic PowerPoint functionality has a free and paid version.
