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Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

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Re: Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

#41

Post by sah2ed »

nertzy wrote: post #29
sah2ed wrote: post #28

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. [1] http://markdown2pdf.com/

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. [1] http://macdown.uranusjr.com

Thanks for the suggestion but I use Windows and Linux at the moment.

Re: Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

#42

Post by kozikow »

dangom wrote: post #24

Emacs users may also want to check out org-reveal[1], which enables export from org-mode to reveal.js presentations with 0 hassle. [1] https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal

What's more, org mode offers export to other presentation formats (for example latex-beaker).

org-reveal indeed looks the most pleasant and I use it to create my presentations.

Re: Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

#45

Post by jez »

gield wrote: post #3

Very neat! Just in case you don't know: something similar [0] exists for LaTeX, except it produces PDFs instead of Google Slides. [0] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Presentations

In fact, you can use Pandoc along side that feature of LaTeX to go straight from Markdown to PDF slides:

    pandoc slides.md -t beamer -o slides.pdf
It works pretty effortlessly, especially when you pair it with a set of starter files like can be found in this project[1].

https://github.com/jez/pandoc-starter

Re: Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

#46

Post by MarcScott »

dangom wrote: post #24

Emacs users may also want to check out org-reveal[1], which enables export from org-mode to reveal.js presentations with 0 hassle. [1] https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal

I love org-reveal, but my company prefers to use Google slides for the purpose of sharing slide decks.

This looks like a perfect compromise to me.

Re: Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

#47

Post by AlexCoventry »

mhandley wrote: post #8

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…

org-reveal is a great modern text-to-HTML-slides tool, and its results don't need much tweaking.

Re: Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

#48

Post by AlexCoventry »

qznc wrote: post #31
thenomad wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. 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. Creatin…

Slides with bullets are an anti-pattern. Markdown encourages that. Thus, Powerpoint > Markdown.

What's the drawback to bullets?

Re: Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

#49

Post by AlexCoventry »

agjmills wrote: post #4

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

- Conversion to multiple formats, not just slides. E.g., making slides out of this org file was a single command: https://github.com/coventry/tfintro/blob/master/notes.org

- Accessibility via whatever text editor you're already familiar with

- Legible diffs in version control

- Text processing is easy to script

Re: Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

#50

Post by everlost »

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?

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