Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative?

7 pointsjoeclark7711 comments

Is there any good way to generate slide presentations from text files? I'd like to be able to push my presentations to GitHub as text, so that I can see changes from one version to the next and so on. Is LaTeX the answer? Somebody's got to have wanted to do this before me...

View on HN

There are a bunch of solutions for creating S5, Impress.js, Reveal.js, etc. from Markdown or ReStructuredText:

http://docs.hieroglyph.io/en/latest/

https://hovercraft.readthedocs.org/en/1.0/

https://github.com/yoshiki/markdown2impress

https://github.com/gnab/remark

https://github.com/jdan/cleaver/

http://decksetapp.com/ does this from Markdown.

If you don't need actual PPT/PDF/etc. slide generation, and don't mind writing HTML, S5 was one of the original standards to do this; there are plenty of others, now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_slideshow

Deckset looks great. Not great enough for me to switch to a Mac, but great.

On a Mac, I like tpp, which can be found at https://github.com/cbbrowne/tpp. I installed it using Homebrew (brew install tpp), which will install the necessary Ruby dependencies. Optionally, for huge letters, you'll need FIGlet (brew install figlet).

I usually go the LaTeX+Beamer route, since LaTeX is what I work with anyway and I usually need LaTeX's math typesetting. Another option is MagicPoint [1], but I have never personally used it.

[1] http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/mgp/

The Slideshow language in the Racket ecosystem: http://docs.racket-lang.org/slideshow/index.html

One of the authors is Matthew Flatt, and he wrote it despite knowing LaTeX well.

Latex is pretty great. Use the Beamer packege. However, its drawback is that all slides look very similar, and it's very time-consuming to experiment with discrete slide layouts.

For most users I'd say this is one of the few scenarios where you really really want a graphical editor.

But i totally agree with the need for a github for ppt (and other binary files, like doc, etc!)

I'd be happy if they could just show the contents on the website (or even if they could show PDFs) so that you don't have to click "View Raw" to access them.

Try http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ and http://gitprint.com

GitPrint is really cool, I used it today in class to make my course syllabus printable. Thanks for the tip!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com