Presentation Slides with Markdown

Here'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>

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/

[1] https://nbd.neocities.org/slidepresentation/Slide%20presenta...

For more like this: Check out marp[0], presenterm[1] and reveal.js[2]

[0] https://github.com/marp-team/marp [1] https://github.com/mfontanini/presenterm [2] https://revealjs.com/

The 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

I'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).

I'd just like to throw 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.

What 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.

This 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

I 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...rectal...

[2] https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js

[3] https://gist-reveal.rectalogic.com/

I 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

pretty 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?

Whenever 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.

For those using Obsidian: https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/slides