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Comment by erremerre | Hacker News Reader

I never understood the appealing of Markdown for this kind of projects. At least on my environment, a presentation is a document that get send to different people, or live in a network/sharepoint folder were several persons contribute to it.

I imagine it must be a time saver for somebody, otherwise they were not be so many markdown presentation frameworks. But I can't figure it out the case.

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TBH the appeal for me is that using powerpoint and the like is miserable. The moment you have more than one element on a slide, it's click click click click click click drag drag drag drag click click drag drag click drag killself to get anything aligned and somehow it still comes out ugly and just MAKE IT STOP.

the dream is that something could do for slides what LaTeX did for text---just make it possible to have basically attractive defaults for most cases rather than have to either tolerate ugly or spend hours doing layout

> the dream is that something could do for slides what LaTeX did for text

Why not use LaTeX (Beamer) for presentations?

Honestly, it's not that bad. I've used Beamer for years, and every time I make a presentation using it I fantasize about finding something like Powerpoint to use instead. You think adjusting things is bad in Powerpoint or Keynote, but it's much worse in LaTeX where you only have loose and indirect control over layout, unless you use something like PGF/TikZ, which is just... tedious, let's say. I have thought for a while that taking a class to learn how to properly use something like Adobe Illustrator would repay itself many times over.

Also, a poor craftsman blames his tools... things like Beamer might "look nicer", but the downside is homogeneity. I've you seen one Beamer presentation, you've seen them all. On the other hand, the "ugliness" of a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation is probably down to your lack of skill at visual design.

But that’s precisely the point. There are lots and lots of people who need to make presentations regularly, who do not have professional visual design training or the budget to hire pros. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the number of PowerPoints and the like made by pros is a vanishingly small number of total PowerPoints. The rest of us are not supposed to be craftsmen in that, we’re supposed to be craftsmen in the thing the presentation is about. This is a market opportunity for someone to make better tools.

I disagree.

If you're giving presentations as part of your job, then part of your job is to give presentations. Presumably, you should also do a good job of giving those presentations. Giving a good presentation means communicating effectively using the medium, which very well could require becoming enough of a craftsman to use the medium well. Lots of jobs require learning skills that are unrelated to main focus of the job. That's just life.

Of course, we could talk about whether so many people should be giving presentations, but that's another issue...

I suppose the opportunity exists for someone to step in and create a magical tool, but I have to say I think it's probably better if people just learn to communicate visually if they're able.

I mean, sure, I guess, if you think that visual design isn’t a professional field that people can spend their whole careers on.

I come at this from a weird angle, maybe. As an academic, I’m basically a professional writer. I recognize that I have pro-level writing skills, earned over years of blood and pain, and that when I read some corporate memo (more often than I’d like) it will almost certainly be written very badly, by my lights. But I forgive that, because even though writing memos and such is a part of many corporate jobs, it isn’t the most important skill, and it’s a skill that takes years to master.

Would it be ideal if those memos were written more skillfully? Sure. Is that realistic, given the constraints on people’s time? Absolutely not. When someone wires up a language transformer model to fix that, I will cheer.

I guess it depends on what field of academics you're in. Speaking as a fellow academic, all the time I've spent improving my ability to communicate visually has repaid itself many times over. This has helped my talks, my skills in the classroom, and my papers (it doesn't hurt to be able to make nice figures). It even helps when I'm just trying to explain something to a colleague on the blackboard.

(Incidentally, your response is quite condescending. I clearly didn't suggest that visual design isn't a professional field.)

I wasn't trying to be condescending, but to point out that your view seems to imply that visual design isn't a professional field---that is, one that takes massive specialized investments to learn!

Well, given a charitable read of my comment, that obviously isn't what I was implying.

There are plenty of fields which require tons of specialized training but which nevertheless can be useful with only a modest amount of time invested. You seem to be making things out to be pretty black and white: "either I will become a master at visual design or I won't give it a second thought!" There's an abundantly useful middle ground.

I've had the exact opposite experience, to be honest. Powerpoint is about the most drag-and-drop friendly tool I've used and makes creating presentations a breeze for my use case. It offers vertical and horizontal guides when moving objects around and manipulating text and images is much more intuitive in my experience than manipulating CSS/HTML/Markdown. I guess my use cases differ from many on here...

The idea is that if you just wanted to send someone something to read you could send them a PDF or word document.

If I wanted to present it you could build a ppt.

And having the source for this un Markdown to use with pandoc is nice.

I would assume the vast majority of use-cases for this kind of thing is that Markdown is really easy to write, simple to add the few markup type things you'd want (bullet lists, tables etc) while having a simple enough format to render to various other formats which are more widely accepted as being "professional" enough for presentations.

For me it's the ability to type math in LaTeX notation on the slides. Google slides doesn't support this and neither did PowerPoint last time I used it many years ago.

When I was a TA I used a plugin to let me display Jupyter notebooks as a slideshow, that was really handy. Much better editing experience than ppt plus you have readable diffs with git.

You can put markdown into git and see diffs of it as it changes. This is easier with a text format than with PDF.

On top of that you can just concentrate on the content because how it gets shown is mainly handled by the system not you. There might be less freedom but you are freed from burden too.

I wrote something like this for conference talks ~12 years ago because I hate PowerPoint and don't have a Mac (for whatever not completely disastrous presentation tool my coworkers used). Didn't use it for a while but markdown to latex-beamer made total sense to me.

Git is the answer. Inline rendering and versioning/sharing baked in.

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