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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
by agjmills 10y ago
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
- nsomaru 10y agoPerhaps you have existing MD notes that you would like to quickly reuse as slides? 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?
- mzl 10y agoSimplest answer for me would be the ability to use effective version control for slides.
- thenomad 10y agoNot always. 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.
- qznc 10y agoSlides with bullets are an anti-pattern. Markdown encourages that. Thus, Powerpoint > Markdown.
- wastedhours 10y ago100% 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.
- AlexCoventry 10y agoWhat's the drawback to bullets?
- qznc 10y agoPeter Norvig illustrated that quite well: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
- AlexCoventry 10y agoThe 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.
- pveierland 10y agoAutomation 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.
- agjmills 10y agoThanks for the replies - I guess just because I don't find something useful doesn't mean that others wont - its always nice to have additional tools
- danso 10y agoGoing 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.
- mcodik 10y agoIm pretty sure numbered bullets are a normal formatting option on Slides. Should be next to the regular bulleted lists button on the toolbar.
- AlexCoventry 10y ago- Conversion to multiple formats, not just slides. E.g., making slides out of this org file was a single command: https://github.com/coventry/tfintro/blob/master/notes.org https://github.com/coventry/tfintro/blob/master/notes.org - Accessibility via whatever text editor you're already familiar with - Legible diffs in version control - Text processing is easy to script