Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative?

Posted by joeclark77 on Thursday August 21, 2014 @02:40AM
from the ask-hn dept.

Is there any good way to generate slide presentations from text files? I'd like to be able to push my presentations to GitHub as text, so that I can see changes from one version to the next and so on. Is LaTeX the answer? Somebody's got to have wanted to do this before me...

( 11 comments | 7 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by webmaven on Thursday August 21, 2014 @01:33PM (#8208533)

There are a bunch of solutions for creating S5, Impress.js, Reveal.js, etc. from Markdown or ReStructuredText:

http://docs.hieroglyph.io/en/latest/

https://hovercraft.readthedocs.org/en/1.0/

https://github.com/yoshiki/markdown2impress

https://github.com/gnab/remark

https://github.com/jdan/cleaver/

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Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by vitovito on Thursday August 21, 2014 @02:49AM (#8206165)

http://decksetapp.com/ does this from Markdown.

If you don't need actual PPT/PDF/etc. slide generation, and don't mind writing HTML, S5 was one of the original standards to do this; there are plenty of others, now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_slideshow

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Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by joeclark77 on Thursday August 21, 2014 @03:04PM (#8209034)

Deckset looks great. Not great enough for me to switch to a Mac, but great.

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Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by itazula on Thursday August 21, 2014 @10:41AM (#8207556)

On a Mac, I like tpp, which can be found at https://github.com/cbbrowne/tpp. I installed it using Homebrew (brew install tpp), which will install the necessary Ruby dependencies. Optionally, for huge letters, you'll need FIGlet (brew install figlet).

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Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by anonymouz on Thursday August 21, 2014 @06:38AM (#8206686)

I usually go the LaTeX+Beamer route, since LaTeX is what I work with anyway and I usually need LaTeX's math typesetting. Another option is MagicPoint [1], but I have never personally used it.

[1] http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/mgp/

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Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by brudgers on Thursday August 21, 2014 @09:03PM (#8210457)

The Slideshow language in the Racket ecosystem: http://docs.racket-lang.org/slideshow/index.html

One of the authors is Matthew Flatt, and he wrote it despite knowing LaTeX well.

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Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by dangowango on Thursday August 21, 2014 @03:28AM (#8206231)

Latex is pretty great. Use the Beamer packege. However, its drawback is that all slides look very similar, and it's very time-consuming to experiment with discrete slide layouts.

For most users I'd say this is one of the few scenarios where you really really want a graphical editor.

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Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by dangowango on Thursday August 21, 2014 @03:29AM (#8206234)

But i totally agree with the need for a github for ppt (and other binary files, like doc, etc!)

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Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by joeclark77 on Thursday August 21, 2014 @03:06PM (#8209041)

I'd be happy if they could just show the contents on the website (or even if they could show PDFs) so that you don't have to click "View Raw" to access them.

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Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by walterbell on Thursday August 21, 2014 @03:33AM (#8206247)

Try http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ and http://gitprint.com

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Re:Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? by joeclark77 on Thursday August 21, 2014 @03:07PM (#8209047)

GitPrint is really cool, I used it today in class to make my course syllabus printable. Thanks for the tip!

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