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Comment by fsh | Hacker News Reader

Please nobody actually do this. Good presentation slides have almost zero overlap with the corresponding article since they serve completely different purposes. In my field, seeing beamer slides is a huge red flag for an imminent terrible presentation. Slides are an extremely visual medium, and WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.

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> WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.

I don't know, if your slides are just a few keywords in a few bullet points and the occasional picture / diagram, WYSIWYM is great.

I agree that you shouldn't turn an actual article into a presentation though.

Good slides is about good diagrams.

LaTeX has all the tooling to write high-quality ones.

I disagree. LaTeX is very good at layouting test, and can also (reluctantly) put figures into the text. Anything else is a huge hack (like TikZ), and one constantly runs into crazy limitations such as the fixed-point math and the lack of a decent visual editor. Slides should never have paragraphs of text on them, so the layouting is not very useful, but the other limitations are very annoying.

TikZ and Asymptote are more or less the only general-purpose modular illustration markup languages we have around. Anything better is welcome, but graphical editors are not an alternative in some cases.

The whole point is to focus on the data and how it is connected, not on the rendering. You want the ability to model your figures as a program which can be tweaked and extended as needed, used as a framework throughout the deck.

Drawing every single figure by hand with a graphical tool is not at all something I'd even consider.

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