Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative?

7 points by joeclark77 11y ago ↗ HN

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...

11 comments

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vitovito 11y ago ↗

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

joeclark77 11y ago ↗

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

dangowango 11y ago ↗

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.

dangowango 11y ago ↗

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

joeclark77 11y ago ↗

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.

walterbell 11y ago ↗

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

joeclark77 11y ago ↗

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

anonymouz 11y ago ↗

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/

itazula 11y ago ↗

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).

webmaven 11y ago ↗

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/

brudgers 11y ago ↗

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.