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Ask HN: What do use to create slides?

6 pointsbloomca12 comments

What is your setup to create slides?

Do you use something like KeyNote and then export to PDF, to use in something like speaker deck, or maybe you create a web version from the beginning?

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LaTeX with packages like beamer.

Treating documents as source code for purposes of version control, collaborative review, and separating content implementation units from display units is just too important. In fact, I think this approach to document and word processing should be taught in schools from a young age, to eliminate most of the excuses people have for preferring wysiwyg enterprise tools, like some sort of hyperbolic discounting function when deciding that the short term cost of overcoming the LaTeX learning curve is not worth it in each situation (so that it ends up never being worth it under that inconsistent model of net present value of the “quick and easy” wysiwyg system).

I use pdfdeck, a client of the Deck package [1,2]. Samples [3,4]

pdfdeck reads deck markup, and generates the PDF. The markup is created by hand or generated by other programs, for example the dchart [5,6] client.

I tend to avoid templates and work from a blank canvas.

[1] https://github.com/ajstarks/deck [2] https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/deck-a-go-package-for-prese... [3] https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/go-for-information-displays [4] https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/a-view-of-design-and-user-e... [5] https://github.com/ajstarks/deck/tree/master/cmd/dchart [6] https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/dchart-charts-from-deck-mar...

Powerpoint.

I had to use google sheets for comercial offers, and I really bate it.

Why?

Latencies.

When you have to submit a proposal in a few hours you need something that reacts very fast.

Having to wait 1/4 second adding an object to a slide is not tolerable for salespeople (or anyone under heavy pressure).

If speed matters, go native.

Keynote to PDF is good enough for me, but note that I make slides max 3 times a year. I don't think I have any templates or anything. I've tried Slides.com and it's great as well.

It depends upon the context of the presentation. For most professional talks I draft them out on paper and go right to creating them in beamer. If it's something very informal I've used asciidoc+reveal.js for a presentation or two. In my opinion beamer does a great job at building nice slides and it integrates nicely with tables/figures extracted from the source publication written in LaTeX.

The last year, I started using https://gitpitch.com/ and I'm very happy. Writing markdown based presentation with code highlight is a big plus, the time that I was investing preparing presentations was reduced a lot, specially when updating the code.

To create slides: PowerPoint. And if I'm presenting I bring my MacBook Air and a handful of adapters to mate up to the presentation system.

For sharing: either export to PDF and put them on my blog or upload them to Dropbox or Google Drive and share a link as the in-web viewer is good enough for going over details in the slides that I wish to share.

I user hacker slides as a local docker installation. creates pdfs as well and lets me write all the slides in mark down. See here: https://github.com/msoedov/hacker-slides

switched from Microsoft powerpoint to google slides. it took a little getting used to but its pretty good with the ability to share, comment and auto revisioning

I've used Power Point and Keynote before recently switching to Google Slides. It's gone well and there's even a publish mode to embed them on your site. It did take some getting used to, but I'm happy I made the move now.

I'd previously been using Slideshare for the embeds but it has been glitchy for me lately.

It depends mostly of my mood ( and laziness ) most of time i just go with google docs, but sometimes, strut.io

Libreoffice. Google docs.

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