Show HN: MarkShow – Create Slideshows with Markdown | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MarkShow – Create Slideshows with Markdown

mark.show

220 pointsmotyar63 comments

Looks nice. Related, if you already have Pandoc installed, you can get single markdown file => slideshow with Reveal.js (which the showcased site is based on) for free with

  pandoc -s -t revealjs slides.md -o slides.html

You can choose other implementations too, like good old Slidy:

  pandoc -s -t slidy slides.md -o slides.html

This method works well. I made a template repo to standardize the process: https://github.com/13rac1/rjsmake

Another option is PRESENTA Lib https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313347

This is very nice when you are willing to write basically code for your presentation, but nothing beats https://slides.com in productivity. It is the SaaS of the creator of Reveal.JS. I usually just make a monthly subscription when I need to make a new presentation, otherwise you can keep everything, just can't create new presentations. Basically "pay when you use it", very fair business model, worth every penny!

Might be a wonderful product, but seriously, $14/month for slides with custom CSS? Edit: And once you stop paying, it looks like you drop down to a free plan that inserts ads in your presentations.

Thanks for sharing! What would be the main advantage of this vs something like Google Slides?

Reveal.js is open source.

I’m a tech school teacher and we version control all our Reveal.js slides in Markdown, sharing styles and certain images.

The reveal.js file format is HTML, an open standard, and will still be readable decades from now.

Proprietary apps like Google Slides, I have to continually assess whether their file format is closed or has recently switched to being closed — because it is in the interest of the company to lock in its users and exploit network effects.

> The reveal.js file format is HTML, an open standard, and will still be readable decades from now.

I don't think the javascript part is future-proof. Any client side UI rendering logic is tightly integrated with browsers' rendering quirks..

That's true, although to some degree the separation of semantics from styling in HTML/CSS/JS means that the structure of the document will be preserved. And at least HTML is a text format! How much can you recover from a proprietary binary format, when the app's not around any more? At best somebody has to reverse engineer it, and it could change in all sorts of undocumented ways between versions of the app.

I've been working on https://presentador.app for a while now. It's like slides.com but more opinionated and the goal is to let it make the presentation for you. Let me know what you think. It's still under development but its usable and new features are coming soon! Thank you

Looks interesting, but you need a "new" button.

Added it, thanks :)

What are the benefits of slides.com over Google slides which is free?

I have been using https://marp.app/ and its VSCode extension, looks similar to https://mark.show/, but all on your local editor.

+1 for marp. Tried it a few months ago and it has now become my defacto choice for presentations.

One particularly great side-effect of being based on VSCode is that not only you can create presentations in VSCode, you can also present them within VSCode. This works pretty great for code-reviews etc. because you can split the editor and have the code (directly from your project) on one side and the presentation on the other, and easily switch back and forth or zoom into the presentation whenever needed using keybindings that you are already familiar with.

came here to say the same, marp with the VSCode extension is just exceptional. markdown files in git with one click pdf export and super fast as you type previews as well as customizations with css or extensions are just what fits so many workflows for dev presentations.

Is there a similar tool that actually addresses the “death-by-PowerPoint” paradigm where people just paste slabs of text into slides and call it a presentation? Something where I can easily insert pictures and control the order of animations, while not fiddling around too much with the layout.

Something like plantuml, but for slides?

Yes, https://slides.com from the creator of Reveal.JS. It's insanely productive, you can just drag and drop things, 1-click for animations and ordering and has other features I never seen with any other presentation tool. I was able to create some of my presentations in 10-20 minutes!

I’ve been working on something like that for the past two years. It uses markdown, but extends it with a bit of syntax to set templates, layouts, and animations

https://hyperdeck.io/

I've been working on https://presentador.app/ for quite a while now. Still under development and but is usable to create a simple presentation and new features are coming soon! Thank you

For macOS users, Deckset is excellent (and native) → https://www.deckset.com

Self-Promotion: if you’d like iPad support and more features, I’ve been working on such an app for the last 2 years:

https://hyperdeck.io/

Awesome, one of the pain points I have with Deckset is not having an iOS version. The other one is exporting to an HTML compatible mode (to keep animated GIFs… animated). I wrote my own tool (https://github.com/rberenguel/haskset) to leverage Pandoc and make a reveal.js export look like Deckset, but that's not ideal (basically, I don't have feature parity and any time I use a new feature I have to implement it…).

Wish it supported SVG files though.

Nice work :-) I have a side project with the same goal. Some ideas:

  - Once started, no way back? How about double-click?
  - Background images would be nice, custom CSS?
  - How about loading URL contents (e.g. from github)
  - Auto agenda / TOC?
  - Support for Math, Charts, Code?
  - Export as single html?
  - Localstorage history?
  - Standardized GH repo layout `markshow` for listing, loading and showing all my presentations?

This is basically part of the feature list, I would like to implement for my personal tool.

You should check out the "advanced demo", it shows the tool actually does support a lot of the items you've mentioned (like background images, code, latex, and loading markdown from a URL):

https://mark.show/https://mark.show/demo.md#

You may try Yu Writer, it supports bg images, toc, math, charts, code and general slide show functions.

https://hemashushu.github.io/yu-writer.site/

HedgeDoc is a collaborative Markdown editor that also has Reveal.js integration. It is free software (AGPL-3.0)

https://demo.hedgedoc.org/slide-example?both

If you're an Emacs user then I highly recommend https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal

I have been using sent from sucklessat university.

https://tools.suckless.org/sent/

Really simple and it has support for PNG with farbfeld.

Seconding "sent", I've basically prepared the presentation of my dissertation in a few hours using this and it looked great.

Very nice!

A while ago, I’ve built something similar on top of the in-browser Markdown-plus-diagrams renderer Markdeep: https://github.com/doersino/markdeep-slides

Aside from things like custom themes and pop-out-able presenter notes, it supports printing to PDF via the browser’s built-in print functionality – perhaps that’s something you could look into. (Maybe you have, but my phone’s browser just doesn’t like it.)

Similarly, there's a suckless tool called sent:

0: http://tools.suckless.org/sent/

FYI: The slideshow (S9) command line tool (packaged up as a ruby gem) is a classic (10+ years old) evergreen, see http://slideshow-s9.github.io/ For slide templates supported (incl. reveal.js) see http://slideshow-templates.github.io

Nice job! It's been a little daunting to write the HTML for reveal.js for quite some time and I'm not really a fan of any GUI editor either. This seems perfect for scratching up a neat little presentation really fast for a meeting or something alike. Thank you!

Excellent project! I like the playground.

A while ago I made https://presentador.dev/ which was the same concept, write MD and produce an HTML based presentation.

Eventually I figured that I don't want to open my editor every time I wanted to create a presentation, so I made https://presentador.app/. It's like Slides.com but more opinionated. It's still under development but usable to create a simple presentation and new features are coming soon!

In the same vein there is Xaringan for R https://github.com/yihui/xaringan

For the same thing, I use https://zim-wiki.org and its built in slide exporter. This allows me to keep my content in the same "notebook" for a nice all-in-one experience. It uses the "S5" system, which, I don't know how well that's been maintained, but the CSS was easy enough to modify.

Looks nice! I will recommend it to friends. I laughed when I saw the "non-evil purpose only" in the license.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not...

Thanks for the warning.

That kind of license is needlessly vague. Why would I even use such software if there’s no reliable way to tell whether I’m using it legally?

I faintly remember there was a project called slidify. https://github.com/ramnathv/slidify The last update was several years ago. Was it no longer maintained? How does it compared with MarkShow?

Is there a tool like this one able to automatically reduce text font size to fit everything on the slide?

Slightly off topic but does anyone know a webbased slide editor that has responsive layout built in? Something like Indesign’s liquid layout feature? There’s so much happening in this space and yet everyone sticks to fixed desktop format.

Went looking a bit for something I could host myself. This looks promising to me: https://github.com/adamzap/landslide

Now if we can just get proper mindmapping in Markdown. I've tried all the libraries I could find and while they are pretty neat they still lack linking and other things like you'd get from XMind.

I've had trouble understanding the use case for mindmapping software, so I'd be curious to hear what you use Xmind for! I feel like I'd have to constantly fight with the layout to prevent my diagrams from turning into a big spaghetti mess. For most of the demos on their website, a simple nested list seems just as effective at communicating the same information.

I haven't used XMind recently, but previously I found it great to use for studying or for brainstorming where I could easily show connections or hierarchy within thoughts. When trying to understand complex ideas or even sometimes architecture I find it easier to display in a mind map at first than to use other diagramming software. I think of it like tiling window manager.. rather than manage all the windows myself, the mind map software does it for me.

I sync my .xmind with .md files using homemade python scripts. Lately I went the extra mile to produce reveal.js friendly mds. Very handy. I did not gather enough energy to open source this stuff. But this comment made me realize this pain point I have with Xmind might be more common than I thought.

Personally I'm a very keen on Markdeep: https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/

I've seen a few other implementations of MD slides before. This is the first one that really clicks for me by having all the features I need. Thanks for sharing!

This is great! I normally quickly jot notes from meetings and calls in .txt files, this seems a great way for me to visualise them after. Useful for my usecase

I first was like "not another one", but this is actually really well thought and nice. Speakers view is very nice.

ShowDown would have been a cooler name.

Showdown already exists! http://showdownjs.com/

Of course :D

I think this should be commercialized as an alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides.

Deckset is a commercialization of this idea. (And I really like to use it)

Here’s a a similar tool that’s been around for a while and works great: slidewriter.io

It seems awesome, but we need to find out the actual reason.

ctrl+D is used to bookmark on firefox. the page kept deleting lines with the same shortcut.

I want this built into notion.

Asciidoc would be better.

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