10 ms·

Show HN: Markdeck – author cool slides, text-only, offline-ready, collaborative

235 points by tcc_42 8y ago

jobvandervoort 8y ago
This looks cool. Looking forward to give it a try. For years I've been using Deckset[0] for all my presentations. Being able to just edit a text file to write and update slides is a massive advantage. I usually export them as pdf, which 99% of conferences are happy with. A big bonus is that you can now version control your slides, allow them to get forked, etc. If you're curious to see what those slides look like, check any of my previous talks [1]. [0]: https://www.deckset.com/ https://www.deckset.com/ [1]: http://jobv.gitlab.io/talks/ http://jobv.gitlab.io/talks/
- stadeschuldt 8y ago
  I am huge fan of Deckset and use it for team internal presentations. Unfortunately, corporate identity is not something I could get working with Deckset. :(
- tcc_42 8y ago
  Looking forward to your feedback. And: yes, deckset (as I learned today) sounds a lot like markdeck, feature-wise... I will have a closer look on that and compare these tools.
- purplezooey 8y ago
  Deckset looks really nice. Wish they had a Linux version.
- alaithea 8y ago
  I love Deckset-- using it is like having presentation creation superpowers. But since it's OSX-only, I've moved to GitPitch, which is cross-platform and has the added benefit of hosting the slides. https://gitpitch.com/ https://gitpitch.com/
  - tcc_42 8y ago
    I had to use gitpitch for one presentation only, so correct me if I am wrong, but with gitpitch you cannot see the resulting slides before you push them to the repo, right? We had more than 200 commits at the end of one day, 150 of them to solve minor layout problems... with a (feeled) round-trip-time of 10-20seconds, that became frustrating quite fast...
    - em-bee 8y ago
      you could squash those commits, but i agree it would be better not to have them. can you commit with --amend instead to avoid creating new commits every time?
      - tcc_42 8y ago
        That wouldnt help, I am afraid: the web hook of gitpitch starts on push to the github repo, so you _really have_ to push your change...
        em-bee 8y ago
        right, good point. didn't think of that. you can push after --amend but gitpitch may not work with that.
    - atsaloli 8y ago
      If you pay for GitPitch Pro, you see your slides right away via GitPitch Desktop. (Plus the support from David is unparalleled.)
thanatropism 8y ago
What I always miss in Markdown-ish mathjax-enabled tools is the ability to define symbols globally. E.g. in latex I always do "\renewcommand{\d}{\mathrm d} \newcommand{\re}{\mathbb R}" etc.
- tcc_42 8y ago
  Do you mean something like this? http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/tex.html#tex-macros http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/tex.html#tex-macros Okay, that made me curious and I gave it a try: please have a look at the slides.md and the resulting pdf https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck/tree/master/docs/docs/test-area/mathjax-symbols-test https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck/tree/master/docs/doc...
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    Lovely!
ForHackernews 8y ago
Does this support LaTeX? Or can support be added via a plugin?
- tcc_42 8y ago
  What kind of support do you have in mind? Converting a whole document, a couple of slides, or embedding latex code within a single slide? technical detail: markdeck uses pandoc[0] as converter; and, yes, there is a LaTeX-Importer available, too (besides the Markdown-Importer used now by markdeck). So, on a per-file basis, it should be quite easy to support other input formats than markdown (restructerdText might be another candidate). Embedding LaTeX in markdown might be a little bit more trickier, because we already use html-tags where markdown is not expressive enough... sigh [0]: https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    For my personal use case, embedding latex in a slide would be the best: I'd like to include equations alongside text and images, but I prefer writing markdown to latex where possible.
    - tcc_42 8y ago
      markdeck supports mathjax[0], might that be enough for your use case? An example can be found in the showcase[1]... [0]: https://www.mathjax.org https://www.mathjax.org [1]: https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/example-math-equations https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/example-ma...
      - ForHackernews 8y ago
        It might, I'll give it a shot. Thanks!
whitten 8y ago
So Markdeck lets you use ascii art via pandoc, as well as generating slides from text with titles, background images and background colors. It can also generate slides with "hand-written sketches" as in the complete slideshow: https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/example-terminal-session-asciinema https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/example-te... I tried to help by putting in a change request, but couldn't exactly figure out where the slides were coming from.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Can it really not include images in the output though? I didn't see an example in the showcase.
  - tcc_42 8y ago
    The word cloud and the stick figure are taken from the `assets/img` folder; you can reference ANY file you want, as long as it is located somewhere within the `assets` folder.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      That sounds great, thanks! I'll try it right away.
- tcc_42 8y ago
  Ahh, that should probably go into the documentation... but for now: the `showcase`[0] gets rendered from the `examples` folder, here[1]. [0]: https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/ https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/ [1]: https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck/tree/master/example https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck/tree/master/example
keldaris 8y ago
Are there plans for Linux / Windows support? I don't own any Apple hardware, so I can't even try this, but if it works well I'd be happy to pay for it.
- dschep 8y ago
  The showcase slides claim support: https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/features https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/features
- tcc_42 8y ago
  It gets developed on MacOS, and is tested also on Linux. It should run with docker on Windows, too; although that wasn't tested yet...
xemoka 8y ago
I've been using Backslide [0] for all my lecture slides for a couple years now, seems quite similar. Backslide doesn't use pandoc though. [0]: https://github.com/sinedied/backslide https://github.com/sinedied/backslide
- Kihashi 8y ago
  I tried Backslide for a recent presentation, but I'm not sure I can recommend it. Exporting things properly turned out to be quite hard.
revskill 8y ago
Omg, doesn't Docker die yet ?
atsaloli 8y ago
How is this better than https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#producing-slide-shows-with-pandoc https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#producing-slide-shows-with-pa... ? Oh! You've got other yummy things rolled in there like graphviz and more. Thanks! I've got an important presentation coming up on Thursday, I'll give this a go!
- tcc_42 8y ago
  maybe important/interesting for you: the pdf export.
  - owaty 8y ago
    pandoc can do pdfs too (via beamer)
    - tcc_42 8y ago
      Yes, but markdeck uses decktape and chrome headless... so your PDF is in fact a near pixel-perfect version of your HTML slides.
      - atsaloli 8y ago
        Yep! I just wasn't willing to run "curl ... | bash" on a corporate computer to install markdeck. I made a note to circle back to it, I still want to try it, the slides look slicker than those generated by pandoc with beamer which is what I use now to generate PDF presentations. my first choice was GitPitch but rendering PDFs doesn't work without using their web service and this content has got to stay on the private network.
        tcc_42 8y ago
        So how would you like to install such a tool on a corporate device? Is docker an option In your case? Is downloading and reviewing the scaffold script sufficient (before actually starting it)?
otabdeveloper1 8y ago
Extremely low-quality project. The only things I care about in presentation software are: a) How do I export the presentation to some other computer? b) Will it even work on their ad-hoc configuration of hardware and software? Everything else is a distant second consideration. The JS framework used under the hood is like #100 on the list of things I care about.
- jmmcd 8y ago
  This is a classic HN comment. Contempt which turns out to be grounded in "I have an esoteric priority which is different from that of the author." Anyway, it exports pdf.
  - otabdeveloper1 8y ago
    > Contempt which turns out to be grounded in "I have an esoteric priority which is different from that of the author." Not contempt. Instead of a lukewarm indifference-couched-in-praise, I'm giving you real feedback. People should cherish that. (I know I do.) My priority isn't esoteric, it's the priority of 99.9% of those doing slide presentations. For the vast majority of people the problem they need solved is "will this work on their junk setup I first saw five minutes ago", not graphviz integration. > Anyway, it exports pdf. If so, this should be point #1 on your README, in big bold letters. In reality, of course, there's caveats, and the exported PDF will mostly fail in real-world conditions. This is not surprising: the priorities are off, the features tested aren't the ones that need testing, and so the tool isn't solving the problem that really needs to be solved. Again, please don't take this as contempt. Best wishes and I hope you set your priorities in order.
    - Sean1708 8y ago
      Out of interest, why will the exported PDF fail?
      - tomcooks 8y ago
        because otherwise he'd have to admit he's been an irrationally harsh critic /s
Gys 8y ago
Golang has a similar tool called 'present' [0]. Sample presentation: https://talks.golang.org/2017/state-of-go-may.slide https://talks.golang.org/2017/state-of-go-may.slide [0] https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present
qznc 8y ago
"text-only" is a good description of bad slides to me. Why do people do that? The are plenty of Markdown slides tools so there seems to be a need.
- DCKing 8y ago
  Text heavy slide creation tools (such as LaTeX and Markdown based ones) are aimed to make slide creation easier, not actually watching the resulting presentation. It's not to say that you cannot make nice slides with those tools, but using systems that make it much easier to write text than to visualize really promotes the wrong thing for presentations. People don't tend to notice this as much though, and they are more concerned with familiarity or speed-of-production of the slides rather than make the slides effective for the audience. But hey, that same issue can be raised for most PowerPoint presentations, too. People just don't know how to make good slides and just take whatever is easiest for them.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  This does allow you to embed images and diagrams. I think they rather mean the slide description language is text-only. But even embedded images implies uninspiring slides to me. For example they have a system that allows you to add source code to a slide, but then don't you want to be annotating that code? Adding arrows, lines, highlighting bits, breaking it apart, etc?
  - fock 8y ago
    For a recent presentation I also tried reveal.js again and I really liked it overall (compared to LO Impress). I do science, so I'm not that into annotating source code, but this total lack of presentation "spice" also really bugged me and I basically ended up writing html with semitransparent overlays over key graphics (more of an explorative presentation)... As to this: I just don't get what's so special about this. I especially don't get, what this could do, what plainly putting your presentation into git doesn't do already? Apparently behind the curtains (which probably does not concern people who do `curl <url> | bash` stuff...) it's using pandoc to convert md to a reveal-js presentation and using a node-based live-server for display. Not even sure if speaker notes work (or if you have to use the reveal.js internal server for that)... Also, this is a security nightmare, as a ton of boilerplate-dockercode/npm-packages/random-binaries is necessary for just about nothing, as in the end it's just downloading the pandoc-binary from github to a docker-container (well, building pandoc was to hard apparently). I'm scrambling my head, what this means for security in applications developed by people lead by the poster if he goes forward like this.
pondidum 8y ago
What advantage does this have over just using reveal.js's support for external markdown document for slides?
- tcc_42 8y ago
  markdeck can create diagrams and charts on-the-fly (graphviz, ditaa, plantuml, a2s, Vega-lite). And it can export the slides as PDF or as standalone HTML file. Plus out-of-the-box auto-reloading the slides on change, emojis, font-awesome, math-jax, and some other stuff helpful when authoring slides... But when you don't need any of the above, then markdeck in fact has no advantage over plain reveal.js and markdown.
  - pondidum 8y ago
    Thanks for the reply, I might look into this for my next presentation (the graphviz could be pretty useful for me)
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djsumdog 8y ago
When I looked at it, I was like, "huh .. it's a lot like reveal.js" and then I looked carefully at the README and it is reveal.js, with extensions/mods. I've used reveal.js for a while. I found it most useful when I did presentations for multiple meetups on the same open source project. I created a little build tool that let me re-use slides for Ruby, Scala and Python meetups (the service was written in Scala, client in Python and devops was all Ruby, but that's since been migrated to Docker): https://github.com/bigsense/presentations https://github.com/bigsense/presentations http://bigsense.github.io/ http://bigsense.github.io/ Tools like this are great if you have several similar presentations. Some of the additions in Markdeck are things I've kinda hacked in (like terminal output players). Still with a recent presentation where I did everything from scratch, I used the same build process and found it felt a bit much for something that didn't require the shared-slides use case and I wondered if I would have just saved time writing it in a GUI/WYSIWYG tool like OpenOffice or Powerpoint.
hoov 8y ago
This is really nice, especially all the integrations. I've been using slides.com for a while, and I may switch to this. But, one feature that would be amazing would be the ability to upload to an S3 bucket. Bonus points for creating a public bucket configured correctly to view the slides. It's annoying to have to carry every possible type of dongle and fight with A/V issues at random places when you need to show a deck on hardware that you don't control. I always make sure that the content I need to show is available on any machine with an internet connection, but it takes a lot of effort sometimes.
- tcc_42 8y ago
  A sync to S3 is a nice idea. And it is completely independent from the generator you use... so I would see that functionality as a utility command, called when everything else is finished. btw: with markdeck, I tried the completely different approach: do not dependent on an uplink, neither when authoring, nor when presenting...
- Leftium 8y ago
  I use https://surge.sh/ https://surge.sh/ to host my reveal.js presentations for free, images and all. Examples: https://marketing-slides.surge.sh https://marketing-slides.surge.sh
  - tcc_42 8y ago
    That looks really interesting.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  slides.com uses their own s3 bucket to upload. But you can't add images or videos from your own s3 buckets / imgur / etc.
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Dowwie 8y ago
Are there plans to enable remote control functionality, such as https://github.com/jpsim/DeckRocket https://github.com/jpsim/DeckRocket ?
- tcc_42 8y ago
  I use a simple presenter with simple forward/backward keys... DeckRocket looks cool, but unfortunately I cannot build it on my machine (to convert the app from swift 2.4 to swift 3 or even higher, xcode8 or so is needed... and that is not a priority at the moment)
geraldbauer 8y ago
FYI: Slideshow (S9) is another free (open source) alternative offering themes / template packs for reveal.js, bespoke.js, impress.js ("prezi-style"), s5, s6, shower, and more. See http://slideshow-s9.github.io http://slideshow-s9.github.io and https://github.com/slideshow-templates https://github.com/slideshow-templates
preek 8y ago
Shameless plug: Being a lecturer, I wrote something similar years ago: https://github.com/munen/p_slides https://github.com/munen/p_slides p_slides doesn’t have any dependency that doesn’t run in the browser and its files can be checked into SCM which makes collaboration easy.
johnlp 8y ago
This is super awesome!! I wish it didn't spam the hell out of my browser history though.
stared 8y ago
How does it ASCII to sketch work? (I am particularly interested in this "sketchy" example.)
- tcc_42 8y ago
  It is based on another tool I have written, a2sketch[0]: that uses asciitosvg (still the php-variant[1]), generates a svg and feeds that into rough.js[2] (converts svg in sketchy svg) [0]: https://github.com/arnehilmann/a2sketch https://github.com/arnehilmann/a2sketch [1]: https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg [2]: https://github.com/pshihn/rough https://github.com/pshihn/rough
  - stared 8y ago
    Thank you a lot, especially for this rough one.
s09dfhks 8y ago
why use this over marp? https://yhatt.github.io/marp/ https://yhatt.github.io/marp/
- mmcclure 8y ago
  Or mdx-deck? https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck I'm not trying to poo on the OP or Marp. I'm actually interested in using a project like these and would be keen to see some kind of "why x over y" section in the readme.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  marp looks great, but I just tried to use it and the $size directive does nothing, there are no docs on how to write themes (which is the first thing I want to do, customize the layout) and generally looks underdocumented. It's too bad, because these tools are fantastically useful, but it doesn't look like any one managed to gather enough adoption to get critical mass around it.
- em-bee 8y ago
  i have been using marp lately. i really liked the live preview and the output to pdf. i do prefer pdf over web-based presentations because they are easier to share without a webbrowser (just send a document) (and they can still be viewed in a browser). most irritating was the fact that i could not use my preferred editor. i haven't checked all the recommendations here, but i'll be looking for a combination if something like markdown in vim with live preview in a browser or pdf viewer
  - tcc_42 8y ago
    I am using markdeck with vim. Markdeck has an auto-reload, that means, every time you save your markdown or change something in your assets-folder, the web view gets reloaded automatically; so not really live preview, but auto-reload on save... And markdeck has a standalone-exporter: it generates a single html file with all resources embedded (url-data, base64, ...); one file to send/open/view, but with working animations and the like (even the terminal session works)
sephoric 8y ago
I love that "offline-ready" is a feature that's becoming more and more supported and prominent. I don't know anyone else in the power user community who doesn't have home internet, but since getting rid of ours, I've made that feature a high priority of all apps I've been dreaming up and selling. I've even gone so far as to remove the concept of "live data sync" from all my apps, partially because it's so incredibly error prone and hard to get right, partially because it tends to make software seem laggy and slow since it shows stale data while loading live data in the background, and partially because usually it's unneeded as a built-in feature if you're just using files, which can then be synced with any of the many file syncing service (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box). Although it's very doubtful other power users will adopt internet-less lives, if more of us did, not only would we be more productive, but we'd all have more incentive to make "offline-ready" a much better experience and even move to "offline-first" like I aim to.
- benj111 8y ago
  This prompted me to wonder when online ready became offline ready. Your attitude is mildly depressing, not because its wrong, just that it's coming from a place where 'offline' is niche.
- ChristianBundy 8y ago
  Are you on Scuttlebutt[0]? It's an offline-friendly social network, and some users are completely off-grid. [0]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
  - sephoric 8y ago
    I've never heard of that, thanks for sharing it. I'm much too busy with interesting projects and client work to join yet another online social network, even one that's offline-friendly, but it's still really interesting to know it exists :)
miki123211 8y ago
I'm definitely going to look into that one. As a blind user who needs to do presentations sometimes, I hate wysiwyg and I always use text-based tools. My favorite is Spectacle [1], as it apparently looks pretty good and I can upload presentations to now with a nice, simple, memorable URL. It's amazing when you can just open up a browser, point it to an URL you remember and the presentation just opens. [1] https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Remark.js looks similar but less complex I think.
benj111 8y ago
The title says collaborative, but the about says: "easy to collaborate-n-reuse: text-only, so bring your own VCS" If it requires a VCS isn't everything collaborative?
- detaro 8y ago
  Merging text-based markup is a lot easier than e.g. PowerPoint files.
- tcc_42 8y ago
  It does not _require_ a VCS, but you can bring/use your own quite easily. Why? because most of the slide sources are in text format, so working with them under version control is easy compared to the big binary blobs known from powerpoint/pages/...
  - benj111 8y ago
    Thanks, I understand that. It's just that I would expect it to be built in if you're mentioning it in the title of the submission like that.
amanzi 8y ago
My only feedback is to commend the author on including a "Similar projects" section in the README file. I love when authors are not afraid to compare their projects to other similar pieces of work.
- tcc_42 8y ago
  In fact, there already is such a (okay, rather short) section in the README [0]. But I plan to incorporate the other tools mentioned here. Only the feature comparison table with all of these tools against all of the features mentioned here will have to wait, I am afraid... [0]: https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck#similar-projects https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck#similar-projects
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    > In fact, there already is such a [...] section in the README GP knows. You were being commended for it. :-)
em-bee 8y ago
i love how topics like these not only bring out a review of the tool in question, but also suggest other related tools for comparison. for convenience, here is a list of all alternatives mentioned (in no particular order): (i added a quick but incomplete review of key aspects of each tool. almost all are using markdown and support pdf export) https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/ https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/ (reveal.js docker) https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#producing-slide-shows-with-pandoc https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#producing-slide-shows-with-pa... (export-to: S5 DZSlides Slidy Slideous reveal.js pdf ppt) https://github.com/munen/p_slides https://github.com/munen/p_slides (slidy2) https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present (go-present-markup local-go-server "can't find documentation of how to actually use it") http://slideshow-s9.github.io/ http://slideshow-s9.github.io/ (commandline-tool browser-preview many-templates) https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle (react-based presenter-mode local-node-server) https://github.com/sinedied/backslide https://github.com/sinedied/backslide (docker) https://gitpitch.com/ https://gitpitch.com/ (online-service 'desktop version is docker based and not free') https://yhatt.github.io/marp/ https://yhatt.github.io/marp/ (electron-app live-preview) https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck (browser-preview) https://www.deckset.com/ https://www.deckset.com/ (osx-only not-free) https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck#similar-projects https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck#similar-projects
gerald1248 8y ago
The reason I use Markdeck for all presentations is the care that the author has lavished on the many, many integrations. Anyone can render to PDF, but few tools produce pixel perfect PDF you can hand to your audience afterwards. Not to forget CSS3 backgrounds, Vega Lite charts mixed with TeX formulas and DITAA - full support for anything the browser will put up with.

235 points by tcc_42 8y ago

This looks cool. Looking forward to give it a try. For years I've been using Deckset[0] for all my presentations. Being able to just edit a text file to write and update slides is a massive advantage. I usually export them as pdf, which 99% of conferences are happy with. A big bonus is that you can now version control your slides, allow them to get forked, etc. If you're curious to see what those slides look like, check any of my previous talks [1]. [0]: https://www.deckset.com/ https://www.deckset.com/ [1]: http://jobv.gitlab.io/talks/ http://jobv.gitlab.io/talks/

stadeschuldt 8y ago
I am huge fan of Deckset and use it for team internal presentations. Unfortunately, corporate identity is not something I could get working with Deckset. :(
tcc_42 8y ago
Looking forward to your feedback. And: yes, deckset (as I learned today) sounds a lot like markdeck, feature-wise... I will have a closer look on that and compare these tools.
purplezooey 8y ago
Deckset looks really nice. Wish they had a Linux version.
alaithea 8y ago
I love Deckset-- using it is like having presentation creation superpowers. But since it's OSX-only, I've moved to GitPitch, which is cross-platform and has the added benefit of hosting the slides. https://gitpitch.com/ https://gitpitch.com/
- tcc_42 8y ago
  I had to use gitpitch for one presentation only, so correct me if I am wrong, but with gitpitch you cannot see the resulting slides before you push them to the repo, right? We had more than 200 commits at the end of one day, 150 of them to solve minor layout problems... with a (feeled) round-trip-time of 10-20seconds, that became frustrating quite fast...
  - em-bee 8y ago
    you could squash those commits, but i agree it would be better not to have them. can you commit with --amend instead to avoid creating new commits every time?
    - tcc_42 8y ago
      That wouldnt help, I am afraid: the web hook of gitpitch starts on push to the github repo, so you _really have_ to push your change...
      - em-bee 8y ago
        right, good point. didn't think of that. you can push after --amend but gitpitch may not work with that.
  - atsaloli 8y ago
    If you pay for GitPitch Pro, you see your slides right away via GitPitch Desktop. (Plus the support from David is unparalleled.)

thanatropism 8y ago

What I always miss in Markdown-ish mathjax-enabled tools is the ability to define symbols globally. E.g. in latex I always do "\renewcommand{\d}{\mathrm d} \newcommand{\re}{\mathbb R}" etc.

tcc_42 8y ago
Do you mean something like this? http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/tex.html#tex-macros http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/tex.html#tex-macros Okay, that made me curious and I gave it a try: please have a look at the slides.md and the resulting pdf https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck/tree/master/docs/docs/test-area/mathjax-symbols-test https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck/tree/master/docs/doc...
- thanatropism 8y ago
  Lovely!

ForHackernews 8y ago

Does this support LaTeX? Or can support be added via a plugin?

tcc_42 8y ago
What kind of support do you have in mind? Converting a whole document, a couple of slides, or embedding latex code within a single slide? technical detail: markdeck uses pandoc[0] as converter; and, yes, there is a LaTeX-Importer available, too (besides the Markdown-Importer used now by markdeck). So, on a per-file basis, it should be quite easy to support other input formats than markdown (restructerdText might be another candidate). Embedding LaTeX in markdown might be a little bit more trickier, because we already use html-tags where markdown is not expressive enough... sigh [0]: https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  For my personal use case, embedding latex in a slide would be the best: I'd like to include equations alongside text and images, but I prefer writing markdown to latex where possible.
  - tcc_42 8y ago
    markdeck supports mathjax[0], might that be enough for your use case? An example can be found in the showcase[1]... [0]: https://www.mathjax.org https://www.mathjax.org [1]: https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/example-math-equations https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/example-ma...
    - ForHackernews 8y ago
      It might, I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

whitten 8y ago

So Markdeck lets you use ascii art via pandoc, as well as generating slides from text with titles, background images and background colors. It can also generate slides with "hand-written sketches" as in the complete slideshow: https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/example-terminal-session-asciinema https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/example-te... I tried to help by putting in a change request, but couldn't exactly figure out where the slides were coming from.

StavrosK 8y ago
Can it really not include images in the output though? I didn't see an example in the showcase.
- tcc_42 8y ago
  The word cloud and the stick figure are taken from the `assets/img` folder; you can reference ANY file you want, as long as it is located somewhere within the `assets` folder.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    That sounds great, thanks! I'll try it right away.
tcc_42 8y ago
Ahh, that should probably go into the documentation... but for now: the `showcase`[0] gets rendered from the `examples` folder, here[1]. [0]: https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/ https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/ [1]: https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck/tree/master/example https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck/tree/master/example

keldaris 8y ago

Are there plans for Linux / Windows support? I don't own any Apple hardware, so I can't even try this, but if it works well I'd be happy to pay for it.

dschep 8y ago
The showcase slides claim support: https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/features https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/features
tcc_42 8y ago
It gets developed on MacOS, and is tested also on Linux. It should run with docker on Windows, too; although that wasn't tested yet...

xemoka 8y ago

I've been using Backslide [0] for all my lecture slides for a couple years now, seems quite similar. Backslide doesn't use pandoc though. [0]: https://github.com/sinedied/backslide https://github.com/sinedied/backslide

Kihashi 8y ago
I tried Backslide for a recent presentation, but I'm not sure I can recommend it. Exporting things properly turned out to be quite hard.

revskill 8y ago

Omg, doesn't Docker die yet ?

atsaloli 8y ago

How is this better than https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#producing-slide-shows-with-pandoc https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#producing-slide-shows-with-pa... ? Oh! You've got other yummy things rolled in there like graphviz and more. Thanks! I've got an important presentation coming up on Thursday, I'll give this a go!

tcc_42 8y ago
maybe important/interesting for you: the pdf export.
- owaty 8y ago
  pandoc can do pdfs too (via beamer)
  - tcc_42 8y ago
    Yes, but markdeck uses decktape and chrome headless... so your PDF is in fact a near pixel-perfect version of your HTML slides.
    - atsaloli 8y ago
      Yep! I just wasn't willing to run "curl ... | bash" on a corporate computer to install markdeck. I made a note to circle back to it, I still want to try it, the slides look slicker than those generated by pandoc with beamer which is what I use now to generate PDF presentations. my first choice was GitPitch but rendering PDFs doesn't work without using their web service and this content has got to stay on the private network.
      - tcc_42 8y ago
        So how would you like to install such a tool on a corporate device? Is docker an option In your case? Is downloading and reviewing the scaffold script sufficient (before actually starting it)?

otabdeveloper1 8y ago

Extremely low-quality project. The only things I care about in presentation software are: a) How do I export the presentation to some other computer? b) Will it even work on their ad-hoc configuration of hardware and software? Everything else is a distant second consideration. The JS framework used under the hood is like #100 on the list of things I care about.

jmmcd 8y ago
This is a classic HN comment. Contempt which turns out to be grounded in "I have an esoteric priority which is different from that of the author." Anyway, it exports pdf.
- otabdeveloper1 8y ago
  > Contempt which turns out to be grounded in "I have an esoteric priority which is different from that of the author." Not contempt. Instead of a lukewarm indifference-couched-in-praise, I'm giving you real feedback. People should cherish that. (I know I do.) My priority isn't esoteric, it's the priority of 99.9% of those doing slide presentations. For the vast majority of people the problem they need solved is "will this work on their junk setup I first saw five minutes ago", not graphviz integration. > Anyway, it exports pdf. If so, this should be point #1 on your README, in big bold letters. In reality, of course, there's caveats, and the exported PDF will mostly fail in real-world conditions. This is not surprising: the priorities are off, the features tested aren't the ones that need testing, and so the tool isn't solving the problem that really needs to be solved. Again, please don't take this as contempt. Best wishes and I hope you set your priorities in order.
  - Sean1708 8y ago
    Out of interest, why will the exported PDF fail?
    - tomcooks 8y ago
      because otherwise he'd have to admit he's been an irrationally harsh critic /s

Gys 8y ago

Golang has a similar tool called 'present' [0]. Sample presentation: https://talks.golang.org/2017/state-of-go-may.slide https://talks.golang.org/2017/state-of-go-may.slide [0] https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present

qznc 8y ago

"text-only" is a good description of bad slides to me. Why do people do that? The are plenty of Markdown slides tools so there seems to be a need.

DCKing 8y ago
Text heavy slide creation tools (such as LaTeX and Markdown based ones) are aimed to make slide creation easier, not actually watching the resulting presentation. It's not to say that you cannot make nice slides with those tools, but using systems that make it much easier to write text than to visualize really promotes the wrong thing for presentations. People don't tend to notice this as much though, and they are more concerned with familiarity or speed-of-production of the slides rather than make the slides effective for the audience. But hey, that same issue can be raised for most PowerPoint presentations, too. People just don't know how to make good slides and just take whatever is easiest for them.
chrisseaton 8y ago
This does allow you to embed images and diagrams. I think they rather mean the slide description language is text-only. But even embedded images implies uninspiring slides to me. For example they have a system that allows you to add source code to a slide, but then don't you want to be annotating that code? Adding arrows, lines, highlighting bits, breaking it apart, etc?
- fock 8y ago
  For a recent presentation I also tried reveal.js again and I really liked it overall (compared to LO Impress). I do science, so I'm not that into annotating source code, but this total lack of presentation "spice" also really bugged me and I basically ended up writing html with semitransparent overlays over key graphics (more of an explorative presentation)... As to this: I just don't get what's so special about this. I especially don't get, what this could do, what plainly putting your presentation into git doesn't do already? Apparently behind the curtains (which probably does not concern people who do `curl <url> | bash` stuff...) it's using pandoc to convert md to a reveal-js presentation and using a node-based live-server for display. Not even sure if speaker notes work (or if you have to use the reveal.js internal server for that)... Also, this is a security nightmare, as a ton of boilerplate-dockercode/npm-packages/random-binaries is necessary for just about nothing, as in the end it's just downloading the pandoc-binary from github to a docker-container (well, building pandoc was to hard apparently). I'm scrambling my head, what this means for security in applications developed by people lead by the poster if he goes forward like this.

pondidum 8y ago

What advantage does this have over just using reveal.js's support for external markdown document for slides?

tcc_42 8y ago
markdeck can create diagrams and charts on-the-fly (graphviz, ditaa, plantuml, a2s, Vega-lite). And it can export the slides as PDF or as standalone HTML file. Plus out-of-the-box auto-reloading the slides on change, emojis, font-awesome, math-jax, and some other stuff helpful when authoring slides... But when you don't need any of the above, then markdeck in fact has no advantage over plain reveal.js and markdown.
- pondidum 8y ago
  Thanks for the reply, I might look into this for my next presentation (the graphviz could be pretty useful for me)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

djsumdog 8y ago

When I looked at it, I was like, "huh .. it's a lot like reveal.js" and then I looked carefully at the README and it is reveal.js, with extensions/mods. I've used reveal.js for a while. I found it most useful when I did presentations for multiple meetups on the same open source project. I created a little build tool that let me re-use slides for Ruby, Scala and Python meetups (the service was written in Scala, client in Python and devops was all Ruby, but that's since been migrated to Docker): https://github.com/bigsense/presentations https://github.com/bigsense/presentations http://bigsense.github.io/ http://bigsense.github.io/ Tools like this are great if you have several similar presentations. Some of the additions in Markdeck are things I've kinda hacked in (like terminal output players). Still with a recent presentation where I did everything from scratch, I used the same build process and found it felt a bit much for something that didn't require the shared-slides use case and I wondered if I would have just saved time writing it in a GUI/WYSIWYG tool like OpenOffice or Powerpoint.

hoov 8y ago

This is really nice, especially all the integrations. I've been using slides.com for a while, and I may switch to this. But, one feature that would be amazing would be the ability to upload to an S3 bucket. Bonus points for creating a public bucket configured correctly to view the slides. It's annoying to have to carry every possible type of dongle and fight with A/V issues at random places when you need to show a deck on hardware that you don't control. I always make sure that the content I need to show is available on any machine with an internet connection, but it takes a lot of effort sometimes.

tcc_42 8y ago
A sync to S3 is a nice idea. And it is completely independent from the generator you use... so I would see that functionality as a utility command, called when everything else is finished. btw: with markdeck, I tried the completely different approach: do not dependent on an uplink, neither when authoring, nor when presenting...
Leftium 8y ago
I use https://surge.sh/ https://surge.sh/ to host my reveal.js presentations for free, images and all. Examples: https://marketing-slides.surge.sh https://marketing-slides.surge.sh
- tcc_42 8y ago
  That looks really interesting.
Kagerjay 8y ago
slides.com uses their own s3 bucket to upload. But you can't add images or videos from your own s3 buckets / imgur / etc.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Dowwie 8y ago

Are there plans to enable remote control functionality, such as https://github.com/jpsim/DeckRocket https://github.com/jpsim/DeckRocket ?

tcc_42 8y ago
I use a simple presenter with simple forward/backward keys... DeckRocket looks cool, but unfortunately I cannot build it on my machine (to convert the app from swift 2.4 to swift 3 or even higher, xcode8 or so is needed... and that is not a priority at the moment)

geraldbauer 8y ago

FYI: Slideshow (S9) is another free (open source) alternative offering themes / template packs for reveal.js, bespoke.js, impress.js ("prezi-style"), s5, s6, shower, and more. See http://slideshow-s9.github.io http://slideshow-s9.github.io and https://github.com/slideshow-templates https://github.com/slideshow-templates

preek 8y ago

Shameless plug: Being a lecturer, I wrote something similar years ago: https://github.com/munen/p_slides https://github.com/munen/p_slides p_slides doesn’t have any dependency that doesn’t run in the browser and its files can be checked into SCM which makes collaboration easy.

johnlp 8y ago

This is super awesome!! I wish it didn't spam the hell out of my browser history though.

stared 8y ago

How does it ASCII to sketch work? (I am particularly interested in this "sketchy" example.)

tcc_42 8y ago
It is based on another tool I have written, a2sketch[0]: that uses asciitosvg (still the php-variant[1]), generates a svg and feeds that into rough.js[2] (converts svg in sketchy svg) [0]: https://github.com/arnehilmann/a2sketch https://github.com/arnehilmann/a2sketch [1]: https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg [2]: https://github.com/pshihn/rough https://github.com/pshihn/rough
- stared 8y ago
  Thank you a lot, especially for this rough one.

s09dfhks 8y ago

why use this over marp? https://yhatt.github.io/marp/ https://yhatt.github.io/marp/

mmcclure 8y ago
Or mdx-deck? https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck I'm not trying to poo on the OP or Marp. I'm actually interested in using a project like these and would be keen to see some kind of "why x over y" section in the readme.
StavrosK 8y ago
marp looks great, but I just tried to use it and the $size directive does nothing, there are no docs on how to write themes (which is the first thing I want to do, customize the layout) and generally looks underdocumented. It's too bad, because these tools are fantastically useful, but it doesn't look like any one managed to gather enough adoption to get critical mass around it.
em-bee 8y ago
i have been using marp lately. i really liked the live preview and the output to pdf. i do prefer pdf over web-based presentations because they are easier to share without a webbrowser (just send a document) (and they can still be viewed in a browser). most irritating was the fact that i could not use my preferred editor. i haven't checked all the recommendations here, but i'll be looking for a combination if something like markdown in vim with live preview in a browser or pdf viewer
- tcc_42 8y ago
  I am using markdeck with vim. Markdeck has an auto-reload, that means, every time you save your markdown or change something in your assets-folder, the web view gets reloaded automatically; so not really live preview, but auto-reload on save... And markdeck has a standalone-exporter: it generates a single html file with all resources embedded (url-data, base64, ...); one file to send/open/view, but with working animations and the like (even the terminal session works)

sephoric 8y ago

I love that "offline-ready" is a feature that's becoming more and more supported and prominent. I don't know anyone else in the power user community who doesn't have home internet, but since getting rid of ours, I've made that feature a high priority of all apps I've been dreaming up and selling. I've even gone so far as to remove the concept of "live data sync" from all my apps, partially because it's so incredibly error prone and hard to get right, partially because it tends to make software seem laggy and slow since it shows stale data while loading live data in the background, and partially because usually it's unneeded as a built-in feature if you're just using files, which can then be synced with any of the many file syncing service (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box). Although it's very doubtful other power users will adopt internet-less lives, if more of us did, not only would we be more productive, but we'd all have more incentive to make "offline-ready" a much better experience and even move to "offline-first" like I aim to.

benj111 8y ago
This prompted me to wonder when online ready became offline ready. Your attitude is mildly depressing, not because its wrong, just that it's coming from a place where 'offline' is niche.
ChristianBundy 8y ago
Are you on Scuttlebutt[0]? It's an offline-friendly social network, and some users are completely off-grid. [0]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
- sephoric 8y ago
  I've never heard of that, thanks for sharing it. I'm much too busy with interesting projects and client work to join yet another online social network, even one that's offline-friendly, but it's still really interesting to know it exists :)

miki123211 8y ago

I'm definitely going to look into that one. As a blind user who needs to do presentations sometimes, I hate wysiwyg and I always use text-based tools. My favorite is Spectacle [1], as it apparently looks pretty good and I can upload presentations to now with a nice, simple, memorable URL. It's amazing when you can just open up a browser, point it to an URL you remember and the presentation just opens. [1] https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle

IshKebab 8y ago
Remark.js looks similar but less complex I think.

benj111 8y ago

The title says collaborative, but the about says: "easy to collaborate-n-reuse: text-only, so bring your own VCS" If it requires a VCS isn't everything collaborative?

detaro 8y ago
Merging text-based markup is a lot easier than e.g. PowerPoint files.
tcc_42 8y ago
It does not _require_ a VCS, but you can bring/use your own quite easily. Why? because most of the slide sources are in text format, so working with them under version control is easy compared to the big binary blobs known from powerpoint/pages/...
- benj111 8y ago
  Thanks, I understand that. It's just that I would expect it to be built in if you're mentioning it in the title of the submission like that.

amanzi 8y ago

My only feedback is to commend the author on including a "Similar projects" section in the README file. I love when authors are not afraid to compare their projects to other similar pieces of work.

tcc_42 8y ago
In fact, there already is such a (okay, rather short) section in the README [0]. But I plan to incorporate the other tools mentioned here. Only the feature comparison table with all of these tools against all of the features mentioned here will have to wait, I am afraid... [0]: https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck#similar-projects https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck#similar-projects
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  > In fact, there already is such a [...] section in the README GP knows. You were being commended for it. :-)

em-bee 8y ago

i love how topics like these not only bring out a review of the tool in question, but also suggest other related tools for comparison. for convenience, here is a list of all alternatives mentioned (in no particular order): (i added a quick but incomplete review of key aspects of each tool. almost all are using markdown and support pdf export) https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/ https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/ (reveal.js docker) https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#producing-slide-shows-with-pandoc https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#producing-slide-shows-with-pa... (export-to: S5 DZSlides Slidy Slideous reveal.js pdf ppt) https://github.com/munen/p_slides https://github.com/munen/p_slides (slidy2) https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present (go-present-markup local-go-server "can't find documentation of how to actually use it") http://slideshow-s9.github.io/ http://slideshow-s9.github.io/ (commandline-tool browser-preview many-templates) https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle (react-based presenter-mode local-node-server) https://github.com/sinedied/backslide https://github.com/sinedied/backslide (docker) https://gitpitch.com/ https://gitpitch.com/ (online-service 'desktop version is docker based and not free') https://yhatt.github.io/marp/ https://yhatt.github.io/marp/ (electron-app live-preview) https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck (browser-preview) https://www.deckset.com/ https://www.deckset.com/ (osx-only not-free) https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck#similar-projects https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck#similar-projects

gerald1248 8y ago

The reason I use Markdeck for all presentations is the care that the author has lavished on the many, many integrations. Anyone can render to PDF, but few tools produce pixel perfect PDF you can hand to your audience afterwards. Not to forget CSS3 backgrounds, Vega Lite charts mixed with TeX formulas and DITAA - full support for anything the browser will put up with.