
90 GOOGLE APPS HACKS
HaCK 34:
Want to take a presentation with you?
As of this writing, Google did not offer a way to view presentations on a mobile phone. However,
many mobile devices, especially so-called “smart phones,” can view PDF les. If you’ve got a mobile
device that supports PDF, you can generate a PDF version of your presentation by selecting File→
Export as PDF, and then send the PDF to your phone using Bluetooth, the synchronization software
that came with your phone, or by putting it on the phone’s memory card. Figure 4-10 shows a
Google Presentation PDF on a Nokia Series 60 mobile phone.
There is at least one mobile device that can view PDFs, but which has no user-accessible le
storage: the iPhone. To view a PDF on the iPhone, you can either post the PDF on a web site that you
later access with your iPhone’s web browser, or email it to one of the email accounts you can read
on your iPhone.
If your mobile device does not support PDF, you may still be able to view it. The pdftohtml utility (see
http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net) can convert PDF les to HTML. This utility will turn a PDF into a
collection of HTML and image les that you can transfer to a web server and view from any HTML-
capable device. You’ll need to experiment with pdftohtml’s settings to optimize the generated HTML
to t the capabilities of your mobile device.