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Is Markdown really the best tool for this job? I love markdown as much as the next person, but it was designed for writing, not for slides. Maybe I'm naive, but

Is Markdown really the best tool for this job? I love markdown as much as the next person, but it was designed for writing, not for slides. Maybe I'm naive, but it feels designing your own markup language for slideshows would make a lot more sense.

m_mueller 8y ago
I think the main benefit is that you can easily reuse these slides for documentation, inside git[hub/lab] or a wiki.
romwell 8y ago
>Is Markdown really the best tool for this job? Of course not, we've had Beamer[1] for that purpose for many years :) >I love markdown as much as the next person, but it was designed for writing, not for slides. People said that about LaTeX, and it stopped no one :D On a more serious note, imagine living in a world where your presentations/slides are version-control friendly. Now look around you. You are in that world now. [1]https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer
- stellalo 8y ago
  Beamer is far from being the right tool for making presentations, and I’ve basically used only that for the last 12 years. LaTeX is for writing long-ish text. If what you are writing doesn’t contain sufficiently long text, then it’s hard to justify the overhead compared to say Markdown-based solutions.
  - ziotom78 8y ago
    I found the pair pandoc+beamer perfect for some kinds of presentations. Recently I used them to prepare the keynote and the proceedings for a conference talk: https://bitbucket.org/Maurizio_Tomasi/adass2018-julia/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/Maurizio_Tomasi/adass2018-julia/src/ma... (The keynote is in "presentation.md", and the paper in "article.md".) I had to customize a few pandoc's defaults (see the Makefile) and even had to use a Python filter to tweak the output, but the result was excellent: once everything was in place, creating the slides required no effort at all. I was even able to switch the format from 4:3 to 16:9 in a breeze, once I learned what the resolution of the projector was.
rcthompson 8y ago
I regularly use Markdown for making slides (via pandoc). It's great for throwing something together quickly. Obviously it's a lot less good if you want complex layouts, multiple columns, and that sort of thing. But I generally try to keep my slide layouts simple, and for more complex things I just use multiple slides, so it works for me.

m_mueller 8y ago

I think the main benefit is that you can easily reuse these slides for documentation, inside git[hub/lab] or a wiki.

romwell 8y ago

>Is Markdown really the best tool for this job? Of course not, we've had Beamer[1] for that purpose for many years :) >I love markdown as much as the next person, but it was designed for writing, not for slides. People said that about LaTeX, and it stopped no one :D On a more serious note, imagine living in a world where your presentations/slides are version-control friendly. Now look around you. You are in that world now. [1]https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer

stellalo 8y ago
Beamer is far from being the right tool for making presentations, and I’ve basically used only that for the last 12 years. LaTeX is for writing long-ish text. If what you are writing doesn’t contain sufficiently long text, then it’s hard to justify the overhead compared to say Markdown-based solutions.
- ziotom78 8y ago
  I found the pair pandoc+beamer perfect for some kinds of presentations. Recently I used them to prepare the keynote and the proceedings for a conference talk: https://bitbucket.org/Maurizio_Tomasi/adass2018-julia/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/Maurizio_Tomasi/adass2018-julia/src/ma... (The keynote is in "presentation.md", and the paper in "article.md".) I had to customize a few pandoc's defaults (see the Makefile) and even had to use a Python filter to tweak the output, but the result was excellent: once everything was in place, creating the slides required no effort at all. I was even able to switch the format from 4:3 to 16:9 in a breeze, once I learned what the resolution of the projector was.

rcthompson 8y ago

I regularly use Markdown for making slides (via pandoc). It's great for throwing something together quickly. Obviously it's a lot less good if you want complex layouts, multiple columns, and that sort of thing. But I generally try to keep my slide layouts simple, and for more complex things I just use multiple slides, so it works for me.