Show HN: Automatic feedback on improving your PowerPoint slides

sketch-deck.com

22 points·edmack··15 comments

For people lucky enough without real slides to put into the rater, it looks like this:

The images for each rating didn't load for me, possibly my ad-blocker screwing up. Closed it now so can't easily check.

Yeah, apologies about that - we've had a mime type issue with our node server that's broken the icons in some browsers

This looks cool, but how does it actually work?

It takes your slides (PPTX format), and analyses each one a bunch of ways, to spot common pitfalls. For example, it checks the reading age, how busy the slides are, how colourful (or not) your colour palette is. It also checks if you put too much text on each slide.

It's not fool proof, but is surprisingly accurate for various slide-fails :D

Here are some formulas for calculating readability for a text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability#The_popular_readab...

Neat - we roughly implement the Fog algorithm

I wonder how it would score the NSA slides.

It judges the reading age is too old and there is too much text and bullet points :)

Any support for Beamer?

Sadly not yet - this was my sunday night hack project, so only got one format in there :)

PDF is a monstruosity. Having the same functionality on it would takes weeks if not months of development. It would be possible to parse a .tex Beamer though.

Well, the bullet check is easily feasible. "Too much text" and "difficult words" too.

Check https://github.com/johnwhitington/camlpdf, which does a really good job to parse PDF files properly.

This is pure genius

Nicely done!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com