Turning a share link into a presentation

A flipbook is built for reading — someone opens it in their own time and flicks through. But every so often you’re not sending a document to be read later. You’re on a call, sharing your screen, walking a client through a proposal page by page, right now.

For that, a reader isn’t quite enough. You want to point at things. Hold attention on one figure. Skip the fiddly PowerPoint export you’d normally do just to talk over a document for ten minutes.

So we built Pitch Mode — and the whole idea was to add it without asking you to leave the page you already have.

What Pitch Mode does

Pitch Mode turns any Living Page into a full-screen presentation you run straight from the share link. Switch it on and the reader’s chrome falls away, the pages grow to fill the screen, and a small set of presenting tools appears:

• A laser pointer that follows your cursor, for pointing at the thing you’re talking about.
• Draw-to-highlight — sketch a box over a clause, a number, a detail, and it fades on its own.
• A blackout key: tap B and the screen goes black, so the room looks back at you instead of the slide.
• An optional slide flow, where pages slide across like a deck instead of curling like a book.

That’s it from the audience’s side: a clean, full-screen document and someone confidently pointing at it.

How we built it (the short version)

Here’s the part that made it worth doing: Pitch Mode isn’t a separate product. It lives inside the reader you already share.

Every Living Page already runs in our own viewer — the same one behind every link and embed. Pitch Mode is a layer on top of that viewer: it hides the interface, rescales the pages to use every pixel while keeping their proportions, and paints the pointer, the highlight boxes and the blackout over the top. All of it runs in the page itself, so there’s no new app, no plugin, and nothing to download.

(Exactly how the pointer and the highlights are drawn is the bit I’ll keep behind the curtain — this is a behind-the-scenes post, not a build guide.)

The decision that mattered

The tempting version of this feature is a separate “presentation export” — a button that turns your document into a slideshow file you then open somewhere else. We deliberately didn’t build that.

Because the moment you export, you’ve made a copy. It goes stale, it lives in your downloads, and the thing you present is no longer the thing you shared. Instead, Pitch Mode presents the live document, from the same branded link you already sent. Update the file and the presentation updates with it. There’s one source of truth, and it’s the link.

If there’s a lesson worth stealing, it’s that one: before building a new artefact, check whether you can add the capability to the thing that already exists. Fewer moving parts, and nothing to keep in sync.

Why we bothered

Most of the time you don’t need this. A good reader, sent as a link, does the job on its own — people open it and read.

But the times you do need to present are exactly the high-stakes ones: the client call, the quick pitch, the walkthrough where you want to look prepared and in control. For those, dropping into Pitch Mode is faster than opening a second tool, it never puts a messy PDF on screen-share, and it keeps everything on your own branding. A link you were going to send anyway quietly becomes a presentation you can run.

Same document, same link — it just stands up and presents when you need it to.