How/ Can I have a countdown timer/ stopwatch in a PDF?

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I'm a teacher who writes presentations using Apple Keynote, exports to PDF, and just presents them in 'full screen mode' on the school's Windows PCs.

Often, I set tasks for the students with time limits. I'd like there to be a visual display of that, e.g. a countdown timer, on the slide being projected.

How/ Can I do this?

Notes

(1) I know it can be done with both Powerpoint and Keynote, but I'd much prefer to use PDF. All school PCs are Windows and so I could use Powerpoint, but I can imagine that there'd be a lot of formatting issues when exporting Keynote (the only thing I can use at home) to Powerpoint.

(2) I downloaded a countdown timer and it's basically a .mov file. It works just fine in Keynote itself but that's all. When I exported to .pdf it didn't seem to work.

(3) I found this https://forums.adobe.com/thread/581377?tstart=0 and I downloaded the file, but (a) I don't understand what they're talking about and (b) the actual countdown timer in the .pdf download on there didn't work on my computer.

User 17670

Posted 2014-11-25T21:24:52.677

Reputation: 123

To point 3: This gets more complicated because of the different implementation of JavaScript in XFA/LiveCycle Designer (another forms technology Adobe acquired, in concurrence to their own one). Anyway, creating a countdown timer is not thaaat difficult, but requires some understanding of Core and Acrobat JavaScript. – Max Wyss – 2014-11-26T10:21:48.300

Answers

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I have downloaded the pdf file and noticed that the file working perfectly as stop watch. It seems they have added a script to fetch normal machine time and display at the top. In pdf You use the marked part in below image.

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vembutech

Posted 2014-11-25T21:24:52.677

Reputation: 5 693

I think it wasn't working because I'm on a Mac, which has some 'issues' with JavaScript apparently. That's OK, because I only need it to work on Windows PCs. However, it still doesn't help me to add stopwatches/ countdown timers to my presentations. – User 17670 – 2014-11-26T09:24:47.923

@User17670: Have you retrieved the document shown in this answer? In my understanding, it works equally well on Mac as Windows. It does require a little bit of understanding of Acrobat JavaScript, in order to simplify the controls for your presentations. But it does contain essentially all you need. – Max Wyss – 2014-11-26T10:18:32.140

@User17670: am I correct in understanding that you want a way of adding a countdown timer in Keynote that will translate properly into a working timer when the presentation's saved to PDF? Max's suggestion would involve making the PDF first, then modifying it in Acrobat. – Steve Rindsberg – 2014-11-27T18:15:16.630

@SteveRindsberg It's a 'yes please!' to your question. Do you you how I can do that? – User 17670 – 2014-11-28T19:35:52.757

I don't believe there is any way of doing it. Instead you might look for a separate program that will display a timer on-screen and launch it from a Run Program action setting applied to a button/other shape in your PPT presentation. That'd mean porting the presentation from Keynote to PPT (or possibly adding a link in the PDF). There might be issues with Acrobat preventing you from running an EXE from a link (Max, I ran into this when testing; it told me that my system administrator had prevented the file from running; I am he and I did no such thing!) – Steve Rindsberg – 2014-11-28T20:15:45.157

I'd suggest something like Rainmeter. Although it's a separate program, you'll have explicit control over exactly how it looks and behaves, and it's fully portable so there shouldn't be any issues running straight from your thumb drive (not sure about cross-platform though).

– Arctiic – 2020-02-23T21:17:46.893

Asked: 2014-11-25T21:24:52.677

Viewed: 2 925 times

Active: 2020-02-23T21:02:25.293