Skip to main content

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

Labels:

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

Post a Comment

Leave your ideas, opinions, or criticisms.
Remember to be respectful and polite to internet strangers.

Popular posts from this blog

Connect with people online without the 'algorithm' coming in between - How I made a social network in one week.

website:  scsp.sayn.work github:  https://github.com/sayan01/scsp This semester in my college I had to build a web project as a part of one of my courses, and I decided to make a social network platform that works for its users, unlike the most of them. The idea was simple, provide a platform to your users, nothing more, nothing less. The software does not assume what you want to see, or what you dont. It doesnt give you 'recommendations' or automatically hide posts from people you follow because it thinks it is irrelevant. If you follow someone, you see their posts. Its that simple.  But how are we sorting the posts? By time? By likes? For this I resorted to one of the most unbiased platforms - reddit. I used its hotranking algorithm to mathematically determine which post is deserving by using its age, as well as the number of likes and dislikes it gained from other users to dynamically assign it a score to sort the posts. The comments are also sorted using an algorithm, but n
2 comments
Read more

Note Taking - An Art

  Note Taking - An Art Note Taking is an art, there’s no rigid right or wrong. Everyone has their own way of taking notes, and different things work for different people. The skill of note taking also requires years of practice to hone. There are many broad categories of note taking, along with several media to do so. Methods of Note Taking Outlining Method Mapping Method Charting Method Sentence Method Cornell Method Outlining Method: Dash or indented outlining is the easiest and usually best except for some science classes such as physics or math. The information which is most general begins at the left with each more specific group of facts indented with spaces to the right. The relationships between the different parts are carried out through indenting . No numbers, letters, or Roman numerals are needed. This visually depicts the hierarchy of the topics, making it easily digestible. Example: Mapping Method: Mapping is a method that uses comprehension/concentration skills and
Post a Comment
Read more