Actually used this throughout university and it works really well, specially when you already have a go-to template. Nowadays I use Keynote but if I didn't have it LaTeX would still be my first pick.
There have been a number of tools to generate HTML-based slides from simple ASCII text. 20 years ago, I was a fan of Magicpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicPoint
My recollection is that Magicpoint was really good for drafting the first version of a presentation, where you shouldn't be thinking about how it looks, but rather about what the content flow is. But fine tuning of good looking presentations was not its forte.
Along those lines there's also Deckset [0], which is focused on turning "boring" markdown notes to visually appealing presentations. I've used it once or twice and really like the idea. It's only available for Mac (afaik) though..
This is awesome! For two reasons - I am very PowerPoint challenged : i dont fit in very naturally with a mouse-click-drag based workflow. I would much ratger have an automatic layout alignment by another tool... rather than spend time trying to align or even understand visual cues.
Second - Im excited about the possibility that you/someone can fit this into Hugo/Jekyll and have three output targets: powerpoint, google slides, static websites. Too much fantastic content is locked up in Google Slides/Powerpoint and would love to unlock it.
If this were a Hugo plugin (which we already use) . . . I would pay for this.
On iOS, makeslides [0] will convert markdown or OPML (mind map) text nodes to a Powerpoint file. There's zero style formatting, but you can open PPT in Keynote or Powerpoint for styling. Unfortunately, Keynote on iOS does not allow styles/themes to be applied to an existing presentation file - you will need a PC for final editing.
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
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.
100% 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.
The 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.
Going 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.
Automation 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.
I like to toggle to presenter mode in this presentation by pressing the 'p' key. This reveals the presenter's notes and a time counter. Other keyboard shortcuts are available from the README.
Personally, I recently forced myself to use org mode for various project management tasks. There is a html5 presenter integrated afair, but I quite like the google io type slide generator [1]
It looks nice, it works well, and you can use all sorts of exporters with org anyway.
This is pretty neat! I've been thinking of having a goal of writing one article + presentation every month, and this is the perfect workflow to accomplish both - write the article draft in markdown format, and then run this tool when ready to publish.
Curious about a couple of things:
1. Is there a way to add notes to the presentation?
2. Is the {.big} notation standard markdown, or something specific to this tool?
While we are on the topic of generating output from markdown, anyone know of a great tool for generating good looking (GitHub-Flavored) PDF/Word documents from markdown? Hyperlinks should be clickable too.
I know of markdown2pdf [1] but the output can sometimes come out looking bland.
I use MacDown[1], a macOS open source visual Markdown editor. You can select from several styles, toggle features such as GitHub-flavored on and off, and then save as PDF. I'm not sure about its scriptability from the command line.
The best example I can think of is the WPF IDE in visual studio, where you have markup and GUI side by side. You change one, it updates the other.
Most people would edit slides in GUI mode only as they currently do.
Pros would spend a lot of time in the markup, which would enable much faster formatting, copy pasting of certain properties, manage invisible items, add meta data to text (like bind this word in that paragraph to a cell in that spreadsheet).
That how powerpoint should evolve if it was still under active development.
Also think of this use case: generate a powerpoint deck automatically from a system. You definitely want to be able to edit your markup for the template, and be able to generate markup from code.
In ideal conditions yes, but many presentations are not in such. Favorites include talks in over-filled rooms in noisy environments (not everybody can hear the speaker properly) and presentations to bosses or professors who judge your presentation by what they think when they look at the slides two weeks later, not remembering a thing of what you said.
This could at the very least be useful to get the initial text on the slides quickly, while still allowing you to fine-tune them in the GUI afterwards.
I would claim that's highly context sensitive. If the goal is to share information in an environment that has keen interest on the content of the presentation the visual appeal is of a tertiary concern at most.
