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Show HN: Patat – Terminal-based presentations using Pandoc

github.com

167 pointsjaspervdj13 comments

In addition to the prior art the author links in the README, there's also the suckless.org project ssg[0]. For something a little more graphically oriented, there's Tom MacWright's big[1] and the in-browser slide editor biggie[2], which both use Markdown.

1: https://github.com/jroimartin/ssg

2: http://www.macwright.org/big/

3: http://www.macwright.org/biggie/

This is great. I'd love to see something like this with terminal image support for iTerm and Terminology.

If I display images in slides it's only usually 1 image on it's own or occasionally with title text.

I guess if you could use an embedded background image shell commands, e.g. tybg for Terminology, in the Markdown (or other input text) you could make it work.

An alternative would be to use Pandoc to create a presentation and then use w3m to display it in the terminal but Patat would be neater.

As an other text based presentation tool I recommend Pinpoint, which also supports transitions or PDF export:

https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Pinpoint

It's a neat project, and props on bringing it to fruition! But do you see there being a practical use case for this kind of presentation, or did you create this purely for the novelty and fun?

I don't intend to make money with it, but yeah I found it to be pretty useful if I want to give quick-and-dirty presentations to other engineers or technical folks. It basically allows me to switch between the presentation and a demo (running in the console) more seamlessly.

For my particular use case: I work remotely and we use video conferencing all the time. Our video conferencing software allows you share a single screen which is neat, but annoying if you need to switch between a browser (or PDF viewer) and the terminal.

I wouldn't use it for "proper" presentations, or stuff that needs a lot of math (LaTeX beamer comes to mind for that).

I welcome anything that support textual interfaces. Thanks and kudos. Also, naming award.

Being a Dutchman the name alone made me upvote this.

Being Belgian, I did the same! But the project does look useful :-)

The OP is Belgian as well and he has a Trivia section where he does explain what it means in Dutch to the Dutch/Belgians

Being French, all I saw was a spelling error ;-)

I like tpp (http://www.ngolde.de/tpp.html). Syntax is easy to learn. It can simulate shell interaction and you can shell out from within the presentation.

And it's been feature complete for a long time. I just tried viewing a short presentation I have at BayLISA nine years ago (https://gist.github.com/cwarden/1349583), and it looks fine.

If I load test/03.md with it, the process consumes around 19MB. Is that expected and normal for displaying ansi text?

I haven't done any sort of profiling, but yeah that's a bit much. Unless Pandoc really needs that much memory to do the conversion, I can probably cut it down by quite a lot. I will look into it.

Terminal-based presentations generally don't look quite presentable. I'd rather use suckless.org's sent. It's a very similar tool for graphical presentations, although it doesn't have quite as many features. It's quite good if you're a fan of the Takahashi Method, or the similar Lessig Method of presentation. Which I am.

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