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Dont waste time using powerpoint or google slides to make simple presentations

present

github repo: github.com/sayan01/present

youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ns4rMnR5A4

I was frustrated with the likes of microsoft powerpoint and google slides for making simple presentations. Presentations are always supposed to be simple and easy to follow, with no unnecesary decorations. 

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY [How To Speak - MIT]

For this reason I dislike apps like slides and powerpoint which spoil the user with too many choices. This forces them to take bad design decisions, as well as waste their time. creating slides should take 5 minutes. preparing for presenting those slides should take the rest of your time. If you spend all your time making the slides (which are just tools to aid your presentation) then you are wasting your time and not practising your presentation itself. For this I made a presentation software that is very simple and fast to use. You dont need to work on proprietary project files like .pptx or .ods. You simple create a text file and write down the content of your slides in new lines.

New slides are separated by a blank new line. Headings are marked by a starting # sign. Banner texts are maked by a starting $ sign. Images can be embedded in the presentation using a ! sign followed by the path of the image. Links are put using a @ sign followed by the URL followed by the text to be shown. List items are marked using - sign at the begining of the line. The syntax is as easy as markdown (sometimes simpler than markdown). It takes hardly one minute to learn the syntax and start making slides.

Texts are auto-clipped at the nearest word if its too big to fit in one line. Auto line-wrapping may be included in future.

This was inspired from latex+beamer and sent. But beamer has lots of syntax (and so does latex) making it harder to learn and taking longer to compile. Sent has short syntax but is a dependency while presenting. The Xorg window created by sent means it can only be run on linux systems and needs to be installed in the system used for presenting, which may not be possible. present exports a pdf which can be copied to any system of any OS and still output the same slides. Sent also does not support image captioning and links.

Example:

source file
output slides (pdf)


More technical details can be found in the github repo's README.md file.


~Sayan

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Comments

  1. Harshit Katiyar14 November, 2022 17:04

    Making slides look good is indeed an overhead. This will surely help.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. SayN14 November, 2022 17:08

      That was the goal. Hope it helps others too as much as it helps me!

      Delete

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