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Presentation Slides with Markdown
- dmje 1y agoI use Obsidian. That way my slides are just notes in my existing knowledge base - searchable, linkable, etc
- daheza 1y agoDo you have good AI integration into obsidian? So far I write a rough draft in obsidian copy into chatgpt / claude then copy back into obsidian. I'd love a way in app to work in more a fluid way. Much like how Notion has its simple AI actions (improve this writing, etc).
- dmje 1y agoI don’t but to be honest I don’t use AI in this way
- nairadithya 1y agoFor more like this: Check out marp[0], presenterm[1] and reveal.js[2] [0] https://github.com/marp-team/marp https://github.com/marp-team/marp [1] https://github.com/mfontanini/presenterm https://github.com/mfontanini/presenterm [2] https://revealjs.com/ https://revealjs.com/
- terhechte 1y agoI'd also like to throw my own app into the mix http://hyperdeck.io http://hyperdeck.io
- porridgeraisin 1y agoFor iPad and Mac only, to save others a click.
- xz18r 1y agoThis looks cool, but is it still maintained? Changelogs mention iOS 14 only 5 dot releases ago. https://docs.hyperdeck.io/changelog.html https://docs.hyperdeck.io/changelog.html
- bArray 1y agoMy first time seeing presenterm, very cool. I will seriously consider using this in the future.
- ekianjo 1y agoQuarto is also nice and builds on top of reveal.js for slides
- NicuCalcea 1y agoThere's also the closed-source iA Presenter[0], which makes some great-looking slides. It's paid and Mac-only though. I use Quarto with reveal.js and love it. I teach and particularly like the multiplex plugin[1] to sync the presentation on multiple devices. My students can open it on their laptops and I control the changing of the slides, but they can click on links or interact with the presentation themselves. [0] https://ia.net/presenter https://ia.net/presenter [1] https://revealjs.com/multiplex/ https://revealjs.com/multiplex/
- stavros 1y agoI really like these presentation-as-code tools in principle, but in practice I find that they can be a bit limiting. However, I haven't used them enough for this to be anything more than a general sense. Does anyone have an opinion on this?
- ghaff 1y agoI tried out reveal.js for a while but, especially with Google Slides coming in, I found it limiting and increasingly the collaboration component of Google Slides was becoming more and more important to me at the time.
- NicuCalcea 1y agoI rarely need anything more than bullet points or an image in my presentations, so I don't find them limiting. However, most of these allow arbitrary HTML/JS/CSS, so I wouldn't say they're that limiting. I occasionally include iframes, for example. The big downside for me is you don't have easy pixel-level control over layout like you do in PowerPoint or Google Slides. Even changing font size, for example, is a little clunkier. I hear some people also miss being able to draw diagrams and flowcharts.
- bluGill 1y agoLimits can be good. I - like most people put too much on slides. Simple slides are good. the reason complex tools can do so much as each feature is needed in some obscure case. However because it is there presenters are tempted to use it when they should not.
- chombier 1y agopandoc has a reveal.js backend which I use it to build my slides from markdown (with a few ad-hoc inline css tweaks)
- atoav 1y agoI really like reveal.js, you can use all the modern web technologies in your slides and it provides you with all you need (including speaker notes). Even if your presentation runs offline the browser is really good place for presentations to live at. E.g. I can include live circuit simulations on slides using circuit.js and if a student asks whst would happen to the output of a signal processing circuit if there was one more component I can just add it. If a question shows up that isn't in there I press ctrl + t and search for an image or a wikipedia article on the topic. The only thing one has to think about is maybe to create a "clean" browser profile for presentations so your suggestions and personal things don't show up mid presentation.
- infogulch 1y agoWhy are there so many of these? Is there a reason why their creators aren't just converging on one implementation?
- doubtfuluser 1y agoWhat is the advantage over the reveal.js / quarto eco-system. I’m using that for my lectures, and am really happy about it (especially since it’s pretty easy to make an llm add automatic speaker notes and timing information)
- ephimetheus 1y agoWhat always disqualifies these projects for me is the fact that they need to use a headless browser to export to PDF. PDF export is the primary feature I need from these, and it’s a shame the export mechanism is still this slow and unreliable.
- petepete 1y agoThis is why I still use beamer and pandoc.
- maegul 1y agoYea. Having intentionally stayed away from going down the PDF rabbit hole, but now confronting it again recently … what’s the deal with how sparsely populated the space is with solid and (relatively) light weight rendering solutions/back-ends? Am I missing something or am I right in thinking that there’s a kinda pandoc/FFmpeg shaped hole in the document tooling space that no one wants to (or can’t) fill? Where tex and chrome based solutions are arguably just too heavy for a number of needs but all we really have?
- ephimetheus 1y agoExactly, I would've hoped someone could come up with a way to render markdown directly into a PDF, without roundtripping via tex and having to handhold the styling process in the way that's required now.
- Maken 1y agoThe problem is that Markdown is not really a markup language, since it only defines the content and structure, but has no way to specify how it will be displayed. To go from content (Markdown) to rendered presentation (PDF) you need a proper markup languaje (HTML/Tex) to be able to specify its layout.
- LordDragonfang 1y agoThe reason it's hard to render straight from Markdown isn't because it's not a markup language like html - because Markdown is just syntactic sugar for a subset of html. Because of that, it's usually easier to just use the abundant html tooling to render it. The problem is that html needs CSS to render nicely - and any tool used to render CSS+HTML is almost by definition a browser engine.
- inodb2000 1y agoI’m using slidev as my main software for presentations on a mostly msoffice based company. I can export to pptx format (it’s screenshot image based though) which makes my colleagues happy for some reason… I’m using the integrated mermaid support to add simple architectures schemas or simple database driven charts.
- RandomWorker 1y agoThe company behind the minimalist writer is writer had a presenter app called iA Presenter. https://ia.net/presenter https://ia.net/presenter I’ve had it for a while and it’s awesome to write all the notes and stuff in markdown. They also provided a good amount of content on how to write good presentations. Looking at these two offerings the iA presenter tries to look great out of the box straight away versus this one where you have to mess with the layout. It helps you focus on the content. I’ve done a few presentations with iA presenter and it’s been well received — note I’m a good speaker but not a great slide maker.
- _glass 1y agoWhy the past tense? It looks great, will use it. I am still using iaWriter. Love that software.
- kstrauser 1y agoI love Presenter. When I used it recently, it was the first time someone described one of my talks as “beautiful”. Its docs also work hard to sway you away from walls of text. It’s probably a good idea to download Presenter even if you don't want to use it, just so you can read its presentation advice. It also lets you export your presentation plus speaker notes to a PDF later to distribute to your audience.
- rolha-capoeira 1y agobeen using this for years, still great
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sugarkjube 1y agoWhenever I go to a tech conference, I see slide after slide filled with a wall of text, or in the best case 3 to 5 bullet points with text only. A picture says more than a thousand words. As much as I'd like to use a simple markdown based tool to create my presentations, most of these appear to come short regarding visuals (1). Look at the 2007 iPhone introduction - thats how you use visuals to deliver a message. Going from bullets to visuals is definitely not easy, and while I'm not as brilliant as Steve Jobs, I always give it my best shot. And a supporting tool makes it a lot easier. (1) if anyone knows about a md-based slide creator supporting good visuals, I'm open to suggestions.
- socalgal2 1y agoI don't know if Markdown based slides are good or bad but Apple has plenty of bullet point type presentations in their WDC videos Like here's one https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10056/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10056/
- ghaff 1y agoThe style for big conference keynotes and breakouts is often different (and often should be). And, as mentioned elsewhere, the production values and effort that goes into keynotes is not practical for everything else—though the level of effort different companies put in varies.
- prepend 1y agoI have this discussion quite a bit with colleagues who specialize in communication. I want to convey technical and scientific material. My presentation isn’t to motivate a billion people to buy an iPhone. My presentation is meant to inform 50-100 people to learn a new technique. And the slide deck is markers for where they can follow up later for detail and references. I too see presentations with walls of text. I go to academic and scientific conferences. This is helpful to me. I like it better than posters. I don’t want to go to a conference and have a bunch of Steve Jobs (or more likely Elizabeth Holmes) giving one word per slide presentations. I also don’t have 100 people working on my slide deck. It’s just me. I don’t need a TED talk. I wish people would recognize the different purposes and audiences for presentations.
- sshine 1y agoReminds me of: https://slides.com https://slides.com
- ghaff 1y agoYes, it’s more or less reveal.js based as I understand it. I tried it for a while a number of years back along with some other folks at my company. But the company largely standardized on Google Slides and I went in that direction too.
- cavenditti 1y agoI wrote my quick and very opinionated solution for this: https://github.com/cavenditti/quickslides https://github.com/cavenditti/quickslides Just a little Python to generate a Typst file and then render it. It won't fit everyone but for me it's quick, flexible enough and creates good-looking slides.
- ako 1y agoWhat is nice of the text/code based presentation tools is that you can easily have them be generated by an LLM: I’ve used it to generate a revealjs based presentation to explain a code base, including svg based (sequence) diagrams to illustrate the flow, based on the LLM (windsurf) inspection of the code base.
- disintegrator 1y agoThe most amusing thing I found about Go is that they built a presentation framework similar alongside the language. It's got some additional syntax on top of markdown but the documentation to use it can readily fit in an LLM's context window. I'd say it's good enough for many simple presentations. https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/present https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/present
- everybodyknows 1y agoInteresting. I'm wondering about its future. Still nominally pre-release, v0.32, and with alternative syntaxes supported. > in legacy present slides/sections use "*" instead of "##"
- dingensundso 1y agoI usw pandoc to create slides from markdown: ```pandoc -t beamer slides.md -o slides.pdf``` And if you prefer HTML+JS slides, pandoc can do that too: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#slide-shows https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#slide-shows
- kubb 1y agoFor those using Obsidian: https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/slides https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/slides
- vanderZwan 1y agoHere's my neo-Luddite take on this. Slides with support for notes in a synchronized second window in just 371 bytes of minified javascript, some HTML and some CSS: let a=[...document.getElementsByClassName("slide")] .map((a,b)=>[a,"slidenote"==(b=a.nextElementSibling) ?.className?b:a]),b=0,c=0,d=()=>a[b][c] .scrollIntoView(),e=new BroadcastChannel("s"), l=a.length-1;d();e.onmessage=({data:a})=>{c^=a.c, b=a.b,d()};document.addEventListener("keypress", ({key:f})=>{b+=(f=="j")-(f=="k");b=b<0?0:b>l?l:b; c^=f=="n";e.postMessage({c,b});d()}); div.slide, div.slidenote { height: 100vh; width: 100vw; /* Other slide styling options below */ ... ... } <div class="slide"> Anything in here is one slide </div> <div class="slidenote"> (optional) Anything in here is a note for the slide above </div> You can trivially use the HTML and CSS inside markdown, so any markdown parser that generates HTML is now an ultra-lightweight slides generator. For a deeper explanation, see Dave Gaur's original minslides[0] and my own presentation on how I added note-support to it and golfed the JS code[1]. [0] https://ratfactor.com/minslides/ https://ratfactor.com/minslides/ [1] https://nbd.neocities.org/slidepresentation/Slide%20presentation%20about%20slides https://nbd.neocities.org/slidepresentation/Slide%20presenta...
- __mharrison__ 1y agoI'm using Jupyter and typst for my slides these days. (Which depends on the audience.) I was going to write tooling to convert markdown to typst, but typst is so easy that I haven't bothered. Of course Jupyter has markdown support, but I'm normally running code when presenting with it (did 20 hours last week).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rectalogic 1y agoI use a small patch [1] to revealjs [2] hosted on GitHub pages [3], just point it to a markdown gist [1] https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js/compare/master...rectalogic:gist-reveal:gist-reveal https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js/compare/master...rectal... [2] https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js [3] https://gist-reveal.rectalogic.com/ https://gist-reveal.rectalogic.com/
- alienreborn 1y agoI have been using https://www.deckset.com/ https://www.deckset.com/ for the same for years and have no complaints.
- resiros 1y agoThis looks very useful to get llms to generate slides. It would be nice if it had an llm.txt I can add as a context directly. Maybe an MCP server too
- gitroom 1y agopretty cool seeing all these approaches for making slides with code, makes me kinda curious whether the tool or the workflow matters more in the end - you think the actual structure of a talk really changes based on how easy the tool is?
- Moggie100 1y agoI'd just like to throw https://hedgedoc.org/ https://hedgedoc.org/ into the mix here, for anyone looking for a collab + notes + presentation selfhosted thing. I've been trialling it for a little while and loving the whole experience so far.
- precompute 1y agoFor Emacs, Org-Present and epresent work well.
- malshe 1y agoI like these projects but in my experience the four most common products people use for making slides are Google Slides, Canva (mostly by undergraduate students), PowerPoint, and Keynote. The common thread is the ease of use. So it's difficult to see why someone would switch to another product.
- maccard 1y agoIt’s definitely niche, but one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen was done in godot [0] One of my coworkers copied our PowerPoint theme, built a super basic presentation mode with transitions and used the engine for interactive demos live in the slides running the code. [0] https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agothat's some madlad ability. I am not sure how he managed to do it, I tried building a very simple game in godot and it took me way too much to figure out the physics etc. part, though that might be because I was making a simple shooting game like space invaders but with red and green squares and ability to rotate ... Using godot to do this does seem to me pretty cool since godot is more interactive than lets say pygame but I am also still not sure how he managed to do it in godot, I would love it if your co worker could write a blog post explaining how he did so in godot! I once wanted to create a presentation tool in ebitengine in golang just for fun and oh boy I failed miserably hard. I genuinely like this idea. I had heard of this idea of using godot for unconvential usecases a long time ago in some HN post but seriously , while writing this post, I realized that your co worker could have also actually made a way to run that powerpoint tool in wasm since godot can compile to wasm and its kind of insane that you can get android,ios,web,every single desktop support while still not being electron or heavy on javascript. I did find this https://github.com/GDquest/godot-presentations https://github.com/GDquest/godot-presentations which is pretty interesting though I wish that some kind of video tutorial could go in hand with this because I am not that level of familiar with godot to actually run this
- manuhabitela 1y agoUsed this in the past and it's my favorite tool to make presentations now. It's really the most dev friendly tool I managed to try, and I guess I tried a few. The most interesting thing for me is that you can write your own Vue components for your most specific use cases. Makes it easy to write some rather interactive slides. And it saves you from having to learn some presentation-specific software, some motion design or video making tool. Just quickly code your way through everything. Quite refreshing to build slides that way.
- spudlyo 1y agoI keep seeing new projects that implement things that Emacs and Org mode already do incredibly well. I guess it's a testament to how steep the Emacs learning curve is, or perhaps how ugly the defaults look. You have ox-beamer, which lets you write your slides in Org-mode, and export using LaTeX and Beamer, which look pretty great. You can also use org-reveal, or org-re-reveal to make some visually very attractive presentations with reveal-js. And finally, if you want to actually have the presentation run inside Emacs, you can use dslide[0] which looks really nice, and leans heavily on org-babel. [0]: https://github.com/positron-solutions/dslide https://github.com/positron-solutions/dslide
- LordShredda 1y agoThere's definitely something to be said about emacs being stuck in time. However, everything under the sun is just a half-baked clone of something emacs already had, except for text-editing :^)
- looofooo0 1y agoJust use e-vi-l-mode for text
- packetlost 1y agoSteep learning curve and it's sorta an all or nothing investment. I don't particularly care for emacs despite having tried several times in earnest. IMO a tool that requires full (or at least significant) buy-in on an ecosystem isn't a great tool and warrants an alternative. I'd rather see good agnostic tools get made and then wrapped.
- darkhorse13 1y agoSlidev is awesome. I'm working on something like this but for forms: https://forms.md https://forms.md
- mentalgear 1y agovery useful! is custom / tailwind css also supported ?
- ajstarks 1y agoFYI, I use decksh [1][2] a DSL (aka "little language") for decks, information displays and charts decksh generates deck[3] markup that is rendered as PDF, SVG, or PNG. [1] https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/decksh-a-little-language-for-decks https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/decksh-a-little-language-fo... [2] https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/decksh-object-reference https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/decksh-object-reference [3] https://github.com/ajstarks/deck/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/ajstarks/deck/blob/master/README.md
- skeptrune 1y agoI'll have to try it and see if it's better than Marp next time I'm building a presentation.
- outlore 1y agoI’ve tried out a few of these, and iA Presenter seemed to be the only one that can handle arbitrary long text by dynamically changing the font size. However I wish you could specify a floor and ceiling for the font size so that fewer lines of text didn’t look comically big. Do folks have recommendations for markdown slide software that can strike this balance? I remember slidev would cut off text when it became too long
- seanhunter 1y agoI used to use https://github.com/webpro/reveal-md https://github.com/webpro/reveal-md , which is a very thin layer on reveal.js.
- p4bl0 1y agoI use something like this, indirectly. HedgeDoc [1] (a markdown collaborative pad tool) also uses reveal.js to build presentation slides from markdown pads. It's quite easy to use and works very well. Also it supports LaTeX for math and code highlighting. The presentation mode is able to manage a dual screen interface so the speaker can have a timer, see the next slide, and some private notes if necessary. Very cool! [1] https://hedgedoc.org/ https://hedgedoc.org/
- tiffanyh 1y agoIsn't this inherently flawed? If markdown can be used to create your slides, it seems like you're incorrectly using slides as a medium ... when instead, you should be writing a memo. Note: I'm not hating on the product. Just asking a higher level meta question.
- TheTaytay 1y ago(I'm not affiliated with this project.) I like using Markdown for all sorts of "human and machine readable" tasks these days. Text-only formats are really, really nice, and Markdown has formatting-for-display built in, so using it as a text format for defining slides seems like a natural extension to me. Maybe you're saying, "You shouldn't use slides. You should be writing a memo!" I guess that is a different take from my assumptions which was: "Sometimes I want to make slides. I'd like them to be easy to author and edit in text. Maybe Markdown would be nice..."
- theodorewiles 1y agoWhoever writes the tool that can Actually Make a legitimate microsoft office powerpoint slide from text will make a lot of money. From what I have seen most of these tools need to do more user research on how powerpoint slides actually look like in practice. There's a lot of "you're doing it wrong, show don't tell, just keep the basics on the slide" but the people that use powerpoint to make $$$ make incredibly dense powerpoint materials that serve as reference documents, not presentation guides (i.e. they are intended as leave-behind documents that people can read in advance) Presentations are also quite hard because: 1. It must "compile to" Powerpoint (it must compile to powerpoint because your end users will want to make direct edits and those end users will NOT be comfortable in markdown and in general will be very averse to change) 2. Powerpoint has no layout engine 3. Powerpoint presentations are in fact a beautiful medium in which VISUAL LAYOUT HAS SEMANTIC MEANING (powerpoint is like medieval art where larger is more important) If anyone wants to help me build an engine that can get an LLM to ACTUALLY make powerpoints please let me know. I am sure this is a lot harder than you think it is.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jacobdelong 1y agoDo you have one of these information dense powerpoints as a reference? Is there data visualization embedded in the slides? I don't know anything about this so I'm curious.
- theyinwhy 1y agoIt's consultants doing everything in PPT. Imho it is very, very annoying.
- umeshunni 1y agoThese are the slide decks that McKinsey and BCG consultants leave behind after a 6 month contract. The deck is the work product that the consulting firm got paid 7 or 8 figures for. They are typically 60+ pages slides on something like go-to-market strategy or organizational realignment that the C-level at the hiring firm hired them to do and will forward around to his reports and teams to implement. Each slide is handcrafted to have a punchy title and be self contained, dense, with links to references and data sources. There's a hefty appendix section so that when someone asks a "what about X?" question, there's a slide in there about alternatives considered and a data-centric reason on why it wasn't or shouldn't be pursued.
- s-xyz 1y agoLove the concept, am a big fan of these kind of solutions. I can see it also being a use case for non-technical teams to ensure some kind of design consistency. Sales can be horrible in presentations and slides.
- celie56 1y agoThe tool looks nice. I've used revealjs for this use case before so I was happy to see your comparison documentation: https://sli.dev/guide/why#comparisons https://sli.dev/guide/why#comparisons
- aborsy 1y agoLatex with Beamer is amazing. I haven’t made slides with Microsoft and Apple software for a long time. Do they make better slides?
- Acrobatic_Road 1y agoSuprised nobody here ha mentioned sent.
- indiansdontwipe 1y ago[dead]
- setheron 1y agoNot bad but I ended up writing a lot more CSS/HTML than I thought I would. Made me wonder if i should just write reveal.js instead. You can see it here: https://github.com/fzakaria/learn-nix-the-fun-way https://github.com/fzakaria/learn-nix-the-fun-way https://fzakaria.github.io/learn-nix-the-fun-way/1 https://fzakaria.github.io/learn-nix-the-fun-way/1 I liked putting the commit SHA on the title slide :)
- afatparakeet 1y agoThanks for sharing! Some great slide transitions in there with your code examples
- DyslexicAtheist 1y agothe minute a CoolNewThing uses npm I'm out. Not gonna install hundreds of vulnerable dependencies for CoolNewThing
- swyx 1y agowhat a great landing page explaining the basic concepts. kudos whoever worked on that.
- juanpabloaj 1y agoI tried something similar some years ago, maybe 10 years ago or more, finally I didn't find a way to make it profitable ... and lost myself. https://github.com/juanpabloaj/platon https://github.com/juanpabloaj/platon
- ingen0s 1y agobelicimo