Actually used this throughout university and it works really well, specially when you already have a go-to template. Nowadays I use Keynote but if I didn't have it LaTeX would still be my first pick.
Can someone explain why you would want to make slides from markdown? Surely its just as straightforward, if not easier, just to use the UI - genuinely curious
Having done this a fair bit, I've often found that if I have a somewhat minimal template (perhaps haven't gotten to the design stage of a talk and I'm just fleshing out the content of the slides), it's far slower to fire up a GUI and make 50-odd slides than it is to write a Markdown document.
Example:
---
#This is a headline
##This is my subhead.
* And
* Some
* bullets
---
That took me 14 seconds. Creating a new slide, 3 textboxes, and adding in the text in a GUI would take me significantly longer. And that multiplies up for each slide.
That's particularly true if I'm having to produce a lot of similar slideshows, for an extended course or something similar.
In that case, Markdown -> Powerpoint or similar tools are an absolute godsend.
100% agree - our data pres people swear by the two column table approach (one column has a few word headlines, second column has a bit more context) over bullets and helps people take in information a lot easier.
The objectives of the Gettysburg Address were entirely political and did not require the audience to keep track of detailed information with complex interactions.
I was at a talk by Norvig recently. I can't remember whether his slides had bullet points, but there were definitely series of single-sentence, loosely related paragraphs. So he might have changed his mind, or you might have missed the point.
Automation could be one reason. For example you might have a weekly meeting and wish to show some relevant metrics and graphs updated for every week, then you could generate such a set of slides using a script triggered by cron.
Going to have to chime in that I recently tried making slides in Google Docs and found the experience absolutely horrible. Trying to add numbered bullet points, and expecting it to be a formatting option as in normal Google Docs, was particularly annoying.
There have been a number of tools to generate HTML-based slides from simple ASCII text. 20 years ago, I was a fan of Magicpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicPoint
My recollection is that Magicpoint was really good for drafting the first version of a presentation, where you shouldn't be thinking about how it looks, but rather about what the content flow is. But fine tuning of good looking presentations was not its forte.
I would claim that's highly context sensitive. If the goal is to share information in an environment that has keen interest on the content of the presentation the visual appeal is of a tertiary concern at most.
In ideal conditions yes, but many presentations are not in such. Favorites include talks in over-filled rooms in noisy environments (not everybody can hear the speaker properly) and presentations to bosses or professors who judge your presentation by what they think when they look at the slides two weeks later, not remembering a thing of what you said.
This could at the very least be useful to get the initial text on the slides quickly, while still allowing you to fine-tune them in the GUI afterwards.
The best example I can think of is the WPF IDE in visual studio, where you have markup and GUI side by side. You change one, it updates the other.
Most people would edit slides in GUI mode only as they currently do.
Pros would spend a lot of time in the markup, which would enable much faster formatting, copy pasting of certain properties, manage invisible items, add meta data to text (like bind this word in that paragraph to a cell in that spreadsheet).
That how powerpoint should evolve if it was still under active development.
Also think of this use case: generate a powerpoint deck automatically from a system. You definitely want to be able to edit your markup for the template, and be able to generate markup from code.
This is awesome! For two reasons - I am very PowerPoint challenged : i dont fit in very naturally with a mouse-click-drag based workflow. I would much ratger have an automatic layout alignment by another tool... rather than spend time trying to align or even understand visual cues.
Second - Im excited about the possibility that you/someone can fit this into Hugo/Jekyll and have three output targets: powerpoint, google slides, static websites. Too much fantastic content is locked up in Google Slides/Powerpoint and would love to unlock it.
If this were a Hugo plugin (which we already use) . . . I would pay for this.
Along those lines there's also Deckset [0], which is focused on turning "boring" markdown notes to visually appealing presentations. I've used it once or twice and really like the idea. It's only available for Mac (afaik) though..
Personally, I recently forced myself to use org mode for various project management tasks. There is a html5 presenter integrated afair, but I quite like the google io type slide generator [1]
It looks nice, it works well, and you can use all sorts of exporters with org anyway.
While we are on the topic of generating output from markdown, anyone know of a great tool for generating good looking (GitHub-Flavored) PDF/Word documents from markdown? Hyperlinks should be clickable too.
I know of markdown2pdf [1] but the output can sometimes come out looking bland.
I use MacDown[1], a macOS open source visual Markdown editor. You can select from several styles, toggle features such as GitHub-flavored on and off, and then save as PDF. I'm not sure about its scriptability from the command line.
I like to toggle to presenter mode in this presentation by pressing the 'p' key. This reveals the presenter's notes and a time counter. Other keyboard shortcuts are available from the README.
On iOS, makeslides [0] will convert markdown or OPML (mind map) text nodes to a Powerpoint file. There's zero style formatting, but you can open PPT in Keynote or Powerpoint for styling. Unfortunately, Keynote on iOS does not allow styles/themes to be applied to an existing presentation file - you will need a PC for final editing.
This is pretty neat! I've been thinking of having a goal of writing one article + presentation every month, and this is the perfect workflow to accomplish both - write the article draft in markdown format, and then run this tool when ready to publish.
Curious about a couple of things:
1. Is there a way to add notes to the presentation?
2. Is the {.big} notation standard markdown, or something specific to this tool?
54 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadJust in case you don't know: something similar [0] exists for LaTeX, except it produces PDFs instead of Google Slides.
[0] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Presentations
https://github.com/jez/pandoc-starter
Perhaps your workflow is MD based and you want a way to target Google Slides as an output in addition to the other targets that you already have?
Having done this a fair bit, I've often found that if I have a somewhat minimal template (perhaps haven't gotten to the design stage of a talk and I'm just fleshing out the content of the slides), it's far slower to fire up a GUI and make 50-odd slides than it is to write a Markdown document.
Example:
---
#This is a headline
##This is my subhead.
* And * Some * bullets
---
That took me 14 seconds. Creating a new slide, 3 textboxes, and adding in the text in a GUI would take me significantly longer. And that multiplies up for each slide.
That's particularly true if I'm having to produce a lot of similar slideshows, for an extended course or something similar.
In that case, Markdown -> Powerpoint or similar tools are an absolute godsend.
I was at a talk by Norvig recently. I can't remember whether his slides had bullet points, but there were definitely series of single-sentence, loosely related paragraphs. So he might have changed his mind, or you might have missed the point.
- Accessibility via whatever text editor you're already familiar with
- Legible diffs in version control
- Text processing is easy to script
My recollection is that Magicpoint was really good for drafting the first version of a presentation, where you shouldn't be thinking about how it looks, but rather about what the content flow is. But fine tuning of good looking presentations was not its forte.
[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/daan/madoko/sa...
I don't think a text editor is the right interface for that.
I would claim that's highly context sensitive. If the goal is to share information in an environment that has keen interest on the content of the presentation the visual appeal is of a tertiary concern at most.
This could at the very least be useful to get the initial text on the slides quickly, while still allowing you to fine-tune them in the GUI afterwards.
The best example I can think of is the WPF IDE in visual studio, where you have markup and GUI side by side. You change one, it updates the other.
Most people would edit slides in GUI mode only as they currently do.
Pros would spend a lot of time in the markup, which would enable much faster formatting, copy pasting of certain properties, manage invisible items, add meta data to text (like bind this word in that paragraph to a cell in that spreadsheet).
That how powerpoint should evolve if it was still under active development.
Also think of this use case: generate a powerpoint deck automatically from a system. You definitely want to be able to edit your markup for the template, and be able to generate markup from code.
For a team page that's pictures of the team and their roles.
For a product it is pictures from my product designer. Or specs that might be put in a nice looking table.
For user scenarios it is photos again, but with a caption. And yes, if I do it myself that caption will look ugly.
So text templates are super useful to me. I'm also much better in using icons than designing them. :-)
http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/slide_design_programmers.html
The one i've been using for a while now is Marp [0]. Found it to be fast, straightforward and quite powerful :)
[0]: https://yhatt.github.io/marp/
Second - Im excited about the possibility that you/someone can fit this into Hugo/Jekyll and have three output targets: powerpoint, google slides, static websites. Too much fantastic content is locked up in Google Slides/Powerpoint and would love to unlock it.
If this were a Hugo plugin (which we already use) . . . I would pay for this.
[0]: http://www.decksetapp.com
[1] https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal
org-reveal indeed looks the most pleasant and I use it to create my presentations.
This looks like a perfect compromise to me.
It looks nice, it works well, and you can use all sorts of exporters with org anyway.
[1] https://github.com/coldnew/org-ioslide
I know of markdown2pdf [1] but the output can sometimes come out looking bland.
[1] http://markdown2pdf.com/
[1] http://macdown.uranusjr.com
http://pandoc.org/
Ideally, would love something that mimicked GitHub Flavored Markdown in output.
One of the nice things about patat using Pandoc is that the input file format can be any of the ones supported by Pandoc (e.g. rST, Org, LaTeX, etc).
[0]: https://github.com/jaspervdj/patat
The compiled binary is just 39KB. Love it.
I like to toggle to presenter mode in this presentation by pressing the 'p' key. This reveals the presenter's notes and a time counter. Other keyboard shortcuts are available from the README.
Also, you can use it as a hugo theme: https://github.com/sporto/hugo-remark
[0]: https://github.com/slara/generator-reveal
[1]: https://github.com/slara/generator-impress
[0] http://toketaware.com/makeslides/
Curious about a couple of things:
1. Is there a way to add notes to the presentation?
2. Is the {.big} notation standard markdown, or something specific to this tool?
One small question: does anyone know how to add a color background to a slide (as in the example provided) - is it done with CSS?