Ask HN: What presentation software/tools do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What presentation software/tools do you use?

8 pointstimdaub14 comments

Hi,

I'm going to hold an important presentation very soon. Usually, Google's html5-slides and/or Powerpoint did the job.

What do you use and why?

I use the deck package [1, 2, 3], and the pdfdeck[4] client. As stated earlier, using PDFs simplifies both presenting and distribution.

The deck packages uses a simplified markup that is portable, easy to machine-generate, facilitates source control, and not locked to a vendor.

[1] https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/deck-a-go-package-for-prese...

[2] http://godoc.org/github.com/ajstarks/deck

[3] http://godoc.org/github.com/ajstarks/deck/generate

[4] https://github.com/ajstarks/deck/tree/master/cmd/pdfdeck

http://decksetapp.com which allows one to write in Markdown and takes care of styling, etc. .

Don't suppose there's a Windows equivalent anywhere, is there?

Thanks for the tip. Never heard of that one before.

I try very hard not to have any slides. If there is some diagram I simply must show, it goes up when I need to talk about it, and stays there as long as I need to talk about it, and then it comes down again. The lights come back up when I'm done talking about it.

I use slides.com. Easy/fast to put together a good looking slide deck, and I can provide a link for people to watch the slides on their own device (if I'm presenting somewhere that doesn't have a projector or something).

I write my slide content in Markdown, use pandoc to generate beamer slides as LaTeX files and then compile the beamer to PDF slides.

There are a few steps involved, but they're all pretty easily scriptable, and it allows me to use my favorite text editor to compose content quickly.

I use reveal.js[1], but my presentations are just bullet points and transitions. It might be harder to use if you like to include a lot of images.

[1] http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/

I create my presentations in Powerpoint and export them to PDF.

I do that, because it partly fixes the problem with different video projector resolutions and needed presentation software. Also, I don't need a working internet connection, which is a huge plus from my side.

I like deck.rb for writing the presentation in Markdown then showing it as a webpage. (Hit f11 to hide the browser chrome.) But I'm considering switching to LaTeX and generating a PDF, so the whole presentation lives as a single file.

I use Beamer (LaTeX) a view with Adobe Acrobat or whatever is installed on the presentation laptop. It's useful for presentations containing mathematical notation.

MacBook Pro and Keynote seem to do the job just fine for me. If I am going to send the presentation to anyone I almost always export to PDF.

I'd probably use openoffice impress or keynote and then convert the slides to images or something.

Perzi

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