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Comment by jimmies | Hacker News Reader

I've been a LaTEX/Markdown person for years before converting to Powerpoint/Keynote.

If you want your slides to be minimal and clean and you don't have a lot of time to do, then Markdown works. To me, over time I am convinced that having the ability to do animations to explain technical ideas is great. While it's not impossible to do fly in/out/moving animations in LaTEX, presentation software makes it ten times easier to maintain.

I think that not everything is best explained in code. Sometimes you need pictures/animations to convey the ideas.

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> animations to explain highly technical ideas

Do you have an example slide? Just trying to understand what you mean.

Yeah, this illustration is what can be done in PPT in 5 minutes to explain how adding more layers/data can filter noise from signal, when I don't think it will take 5 minutes for me to write a LaTEX code that does the same. That's not counting Powerpoint does allow me to draw lines and stuff easily on a canvas. If I want to do it in LaTEX, I probably will need to draw that diagram on a separate program and import it back.

https://giphy.com/gifs/4GXOwrfX1p9SuzbGzS/fullscreen

Sorry, the slide is clipped for some reason, but that's because I don't know how to configure OBS. It's not the best illustration ever, but you probably get the idea.

Here is an animation that isn't mine and I think it's really well done to explain a hard idea (not necessarily in PPT):

https://youtu.be/Tfh0ytz8S0k?t=123

I agree. I've given talks on pretty math-heavy ideas but they can still usually be explained visually in a way that is significantly easier to understand without losing fidelity. I love LaTeX and Beamer for pure text/math, but once you want animated slides, or even including videos/gifs, PDF gets flaky fast. Keynote and PPT are pretty powerful tools.

(also, the 8-bit guy is great!)

Steven Wittens have written about this and his MathBox^2. I've never used it, and from the examples it looks like it might be too much work for most presentations to be worth it, but the examples are pretty impressive.

http://acko.net/blog/mathbox2/

https://gitgud.io/unconed/mathbox

Oh, I'm already completely convinced about the expressive power of animations. Just wasn't sure how much is possible with PPT/Keynote. Could 3Blue1brown videos be made in Keynote? But I can definitely see your point. :-)

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