Fusuma – Make slides with MarkDown easily | Hacker News Reader

Fusuma – Make slides with MarkDown easily

github.com

122 pointspeaceiris41 comments

I’m surprised no one’s mentioned pandoc by now. It’s a Swiss army knife that among other things makes slides from Markdown documents and lets you pick from a number of JS templates or Latex/Beamer. Converting Markdown to PDF slides is just a simple-ish oneliner away.

And terrific for a whole number of other use cases, too - including but not limited to Markdown <-> Word, Epub conversion, HTML conversion and endless others. I find myself turning to it all the time.

https://pandoc.org/

I love pandoc, and I would love it even more if it had full support for LaTeX math. Unfortunately, the math support is very primitive (meaning, I cannot copy-paste maths from my LaTeX paper and expect it to work and look correct once converted to html, even with the mathjax option). I spend a weekend trying to hack the haskell code to correct a few problems, but it got to nothing.

Used pandoc for a couple presentations recently and while it's clear the experience will be wonderful eventually, it's still a bit buggy. There is no widescreen template included with Pandoc and attempts to use other templates caused me to encounter https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/5402 . The resulting .pptx files won't open in Keynote, either, but luckily they did open in Google Slides, which then let me download a visually-identical .pptx that opens everywhere. Point is, slide support in Pandoc is still somewhat new and people should not go in expecting a trouble-free experience at this point.

I use pandoc to output revealjs presentations when I want to present web things (with links, videos or gifs). And it is good as I have some teaching content that I use in webpages, in presentation and for print.

Presentation notes kind of work, but I don't like them (in general, not just for revealjs)?

Maybe I missed it, but there doesn't seem to be an explanation for the name. I think software that use clever names should explain why. In this case, fusuma are traditional Japanese sliding doors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusuma

> should

I wouldn't say we are entitled to an explanation of why an open source project is titled any more than we are entitled to the project being open source in the first place.

It's not about entitlement; if the purpose of a name isn't to give people an easy way to remember something, what good is it?

If the developer wanted to increase interest in the project, explaining the name could only further this goal.

You're right of course. It's just as someone who struggles with naming projects, I often get annoyed when I see comments on HN focusing on naming things rather than the cool work that has been shared and donated to the community. However on reflection, on this occasion my comment was unfair.

That might justify using "should" in a prudential sense, but not a moral sense.

Or any more than we are entitled to an explanation of the name of any business, individual, or [noun] we encounter.

It doesn't need any explanation, but if you do get it, that is a nice little winking reference.

Cool project. Looks like it's in a similar space as Marp [0].

[0]: https://yhatt.github.io/marp/

On macOS, I strongly recommend DeckSet[0]. It's a Keynote/Powerpoint from Markdown, especially valuable when you embed code in your presentations.

[0]: https://www.deckset.com/

i'm completely willing to support good software with money, but there are so many amazing options being posted in this thread that are feature rich, multiplatform, and free. why do you choose deckset when it's missing two of these three? are there must-have features that the others don't offer?

Nice questions!

I use DeckSet since a lot of years, I find it easy to use and I love the result. I don’t care about multi platform because I’m doing my presentation on a Mac. I don’t care paying fair prices to software.

The only downside I found was the lack of customization offered.

I’ll look into the GitHub list, especially to the 2 others macOS apps

A list of Markdown presentation tools :

https://gist.github.com/johnloy/27dd124ad40e210e91c70dd1c24a...

I have been using https://hackmd.io/ for quite some time now.

thanks for posting this comment; hackmd looks great!

awesome features, and great that it's open source.

Saw this and remembered when I made some HTML slides during my first year on the OASIS XDI technical committee in 2005. I used Docbook, and the Slide document template created by Norm Walsh: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/slides/current/doc/

He and I differed quite a bit on XDI (he was not on the XDI TC but provided feedback as part of a public review), and I still think something like XDI will exist in the future, but I have to give him credit - Docbook is an awesome tool.

There's also DITA (a more modular, but also more complicated, Docbook alternative from OASIS). There's a plugin for DITA that lets you do slides in DITA and create Reveal.js based HTML presentations.

https://github.com/doctales/org.doctales.reveal

Swipe.to was a startup that had a very similar idea (.md powered slides), don't know what happened to them, but this project brings back the memories from my days in London meeting cool startups like them..plus the demo and the Readme look pretty tight, good job!

For an alternative slides maker / builder from markdown sources, see the slideshow (s9) tool [1]. Slides template packs include s6, reveal.js, shower,js, impress.js, and many more [2]. [1]: http://slideshow-s9.github.io [2]: http://slideshow-templates.github.io

PS: Note - slideshow (s9) templates are just jekyll (liquid) templates and, thus, work out-of-the-box with github pages and friends.

PPS: What's jekyll :-)? It's the world's most popular (static) website compiler / builder.

I recommend Remark

https://remarkjs.com

You may want to add a comparison to similar tools to your readme; there are quite a few.

Disappointed there's no built executable. I'm not into web development, so I don't have npm or yarn handy. Seems like a missed opportunity; a binary would open this project to a larger community.

If it's built with nodejs you won't be able to make a binary without packaging the whole node/npm with it.

For standalone binary Golang is a better choice but that probably wasn't in scope for the developer who wrote it.

I've used `present` (a Go binary) for several years now. It has the bare minimum of features but it gets the job done.

https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/present

I'm a big fan of code-surfer, which uses MDX.

https://github.com/pomber/code-surfer

In the past I needed something like this. Asciidoctor has a nice slides output just need a bit of style

Pretty cool! Can I run this via Docker? Can I use it to open remote .md files?

The design of unix/linux systems answers your second question with "yes." A "file" isn't necessarily something on your SSD, but rather an abstract concept: something that you can "read" from and possibly "write" to (and some other less illustrative things). It could be under your desk, a pointer to another file, or a file on a remote computer.

Look into "sshfs".

We can run Fusuma on Node Docker image.

Something really irreverent: it is Markdown not MarkDown.

...npm

Nope...

.fusumarc.yml

Oh hell no.

Whoever thought yaml was a good idea (not for this project, I mean at all, ever) is mentally deficient. Those that insist on using it are barely any better.

YAML is a mess of a language but what's wrong with npm?

What’s right with it?

It makes it easy to distribute tools and libraries. There are security concerns but for something like this, it seems like a fine distribution method. No one is stopping you from just cloning the repo if you don't want to use npm though.

The community/npm encourages things like the `isEven`, etc bullshit.

A whole package, to do `foo % 2 === 0` ?? Oh but then it has a dependency on ANOTHER package which just checks if a variable is a number.

Oh and then there's the isOdd, which is an entire package.. to do `! isEven`... ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

I don't know anyone who writes professional level code that uses packages like that. Sure, they exist. I'm sure you could find other simple, funny packages across other ecosystems. Yes, the micro-packages can be too granular but that's no fault of the author nor the creators of npm. It's the result of people doing stupid stuff just like people have for decades before. The difference is that these micro-packages are more visible on npm and everyone wants their chance to say "yup, I wrote that module."

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd Has 700K downloads a week.

A year ago it had 3M a week.

When someone brought up that this project even exists it wa being used (possibly indirectly) by some very popular libraries.

This is not normal.

Cool project. I'll stick with LaTeX and Beamer.

awesome!

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