Comment by evacchi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evacchi | Hacker News Reader

This is nice.

A bit OT: on the subject of presentation tools, I'm struggling to find something that suits me.

I really like Deckset[0], but found it sometimes limiting. For instance, I found that very few themes suite my style of presentation; and I often wish I could choose different color palettes, or left-align the text in a centered layout (e.g. when using bullet lists)

I generally dislike HTML-based presenting tools; I do not like the idea of using the browser; the PDF export is usually hit and miss, and I would not risk going to a venue with broken slides.

I have also tried to experiment with (La)TeX. Unfortunately I find LaTeX very boilerplate-y, and the de-facto standard for presentations, Beamer, is not easy to customize; even the most modern themes are designed with lots of text in mind, and I'd like Deckset-like layout with little text, many headings/large fonts (sometimes more than one section in one slide) and mostly source code.

I have experimented with `lecturer.tex` and even plain TeX [1]. The idea would have been to use it as a compilation target for Markdown (maybe using Pandoc). Unfortunately I could not find a satisfying way to typeset source code with syntax highlighting in plain TeX [2], and also working with modern fonts (TTF/OTF) in TeX is generally a pain (e.g. lecturer.tex doesn't play well with XeTeX; LuaTeX on the other hand is slightly less convenient with fonts)

[0] http://www.decksetapp.com/

[1] https://twitter.com/evacchi/status/738018333228978176 , https://github.com/evacchi/lecturer-playground

[2] http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/312249/listings-for-p...

I'm working on something that given a markdown file with a specific marker "---" splits it into slides and opens your browser with an impress.js version of your slides.

Is this something that interests you? The project is private but I may open source it sooner.

Also, written in Python

There is also Remark.js that converts Markdown into HTML slides - https://github.com/gnab/remark

Also, I'm working on an HTML/JS Slide version - just download it and edit HTML contents. It uses the same markup as in Android Slide and no build system is needed, just edit, press F5, see how it looks like.

https://github.com/trikita/slide-html

Yes, remark.js is cool. I've used it for a presentation before (see http://varkensmuts.nl/). The only thing that should be automated is running the video's locally. I've rarely had a venue that had a proper Wifi connection.

I really like your slide-html, very simple and looks great!

My Favorite of the bunch after finding Deckset unfulfilling is keydown[1]. It is easy to setup and easy to customize the CSS per slideshow or per project. It is not the best in terms of documentation, but the deck.js documentation has been sufficient where keydown hasn't been helpful. Hasn't been updated in years, but I haven't found anything it doesn't do that I need it to.

[1]https://github.com/infews/keydown

Have you tried Pandoc[0]? It's the best, simplest solution I've been able to find for writing content in Markdown, and then almost trivially exporting that same content into PDF manuscripts, or PDF presentations, or HTML presentations, or more, without having to change the source content. It seems to be increasingly popular in academia for handling class notes/slides/papers all in one go. It can have good citation processing with cite-proc [1]. One of my favorite things about it is, if you know you're just going to be exporting to a specific filetype like HTML or LaTeX, you can just plain throw in code for that language directly into the Markdown, and Pandoc will run/include it.

(shameless plug alert) I wrote a super-simple Makefile script for using Pandoc, called acadoc [2]. It lets you call "make beamer", "make manuscript", "make html_presentation", etc., in a directory with Markdown files to turn them all into whatever presentation/manuscript/paper/etc. you want. The key thing, though, is that for LaTeX presentations/etc. it uses an intermediary "style/manuscript.tex" file to customize how you want your resulting LaTeX to look -- so if you want the same content, but decide the presentation looks better with white-on-black instead of black-on-white, you only need make a few changes and create a "style/manuscript_dark.tex", copy-paste that style in the Makefile, and now you can call "make manuscript_dark". It's meant to be quick and easy to use, and theoretically easy to add new recipes to.

If you want some more serious power about multiple document-type exporting, check out the links in the Acknowledgements section of Acadoc, shown here:

- https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2014/01/23/plain-text/ - http://jeromyanglim.blogspot.com/2012/07/beamer-pandoc-markd... - https://github.com/timtylin/scholdoc - http://scholarlymarkdown.com/

(Yes, I know LaTeX styles/stylesheets are a thing, but I've never taken the time to learn them, nor figure out if they can do all the custom formatting a regular .tex stylization file can do.)

[0] http://pandoc.org/

[1] https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc

[2] https://github.com/asoplata/acadoc

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