When you run acroread for the first time, it has an irritating habit of showing a license screen. On 800x600 (or smaller) screens, you can't reach down to the "I Accept" button. In this situation, here's what works:
*ShowUnixEula: false. By default, it is
true until you say "I accept". By setting it to false, you solve
the problem.
Ctrl-L makes it go fullscreen. This is essential for playing .pdf files which are slideshows.
Install xpdf, and say xpdf -fullscreen file.pdf --
this should work for most slideshows. My suggestion is that you should
normally use xpdf in this fashion, and drop back into using
acroread in situations where xpdf breaks.
Derek B. Noonburg, the author of xpdf, suggested to me that while xpdf wasn't really well designed for fullscreen use, the flags "-bg black -papercolor black" help in making the show look better.
Look at these links --
Anyone who has used xdvi is used to the way in which
it notices when a .dvi file has been modified on the disk. It reloads
the .dvi file every time it has been modified. Acroread does not do
this by default.
The shortest way I know of is to say Ctrl-W (close file) and then Ctrl-leftarrow to restart where you left off.
A good way out is to use xpdf. Unlike xdvi, it does
not reload file upon window open/close operations, but when you say
'r' or page up or page down, it notices the file has changed and
reloads it.
Have yet to get perfect instructions. Ctrl-Shift-P with acroread gives you a print menu. How would one do two, four or six slides per page?
Acroread is quite inconvenient when it comes to picking up text from a PDF file. xpdf is much better.
I got help from Mohit Agarwal (mohit at foc.demonhosting.co.uk).
Ajay Shah, 2003