New presentation making platform! Nice but changeable aesthetics and easy editing! Hopefully this would work out for me!
Here is a quick sample that I made!
Moving away from Latex Beamer
Previously, I have been attempting to find a replacement for Latex Beamer for making presentation slides. Latex is a very… unpleasant markup language to work with when typing the small section of text used in slides, the over-head is just too high, and default settings for various slide elements is either non-existent or hard to find proper documentations. I thought it was maybe time to try and find an alternative to use.
What I was looking for
There are still quite a lot of aspects of Latex beamer that I wish I could keep in the new platform that I am looking for.
Cut between template design in content design: This is the part I find very annoying with most GUI based document makers, for most of the slides, I would like to keep a uniformed look, and for some reason I had always thought the way GUI based presentation makers handled templates is a bit hard to work with and difficult to pass between machines.
Minimal Overhead in document: The main problem with making slides in latex is that often the documents is cluttered up with the latex commands rather than the content. Markdown is one of the most lightweight yet comprehensive markup languages, and what it lacks in advanced formatting features, it makes up for by allowing embed HTML! Here apparently HTML/CSS web based tools would be a good idea to proceed. I have always shied away at the idea since I didn’t like the aesthetics of HTML tags in documents too much. But is everything could be packed into CSS, this might be a good alternative to work with!
Minimal use of external tools: I would rather that I don’t have to constantly switch between application to make a document. Right now, everything other document related tasks are performed using atom as my primary editor, so I would prefer text-based applications, but I would mind a whole new platform if it meant there is a good all-in-one package where I can complete all of my editing works.
(Optional) WYSIWYG editing: Many things in slide creation are case-by-case: adding description beside a diagram, tweaking template parameters. I must say that text based is precise, but very slow to make graphical changes.
Local editing: I’m not a bit fan of cloud editing.
What I found
When searching for a solution that uses Markdown for the primary text format, I was introduced to various web-based presentation solution, the one that stood out for me was reveal.js
Off the shelf, it looks fresh and appealing, and being HTML+CSS, everything is essentially tweak-able. To that is the problem template problem sorted out (with a big plus of having a good starting point for making new templates).
I could mix and match markdown and HTML, meaning that I could have a very simple work flow if I’m going for a simple slide look, by at the same time, I won’t be limited by Markdown if I want to make something fancier. It also means I could embed it into other websites if I so desire.
Text based. Talk about no other tools.
WYSIWYG Editing. This is where is fall flat. There is the official graphical editor, but the HTML it generates is not designed to be human editable. But given the tools I could have, there might be alternatives.
Exporting to PDF (something I consider essential for presentation in groups) is rather more troublesome that I had thought. But I guess since atom is essentially a heavily modded browser, I should be able to get the preview within atom, and only export to DPF when everything is done. (If I cared to look hard enough, I guess there will be JavaScript libraries to export with atom, but that is getting ahead of myself)
Given all of its merits, there is one big thing I miss about beamer that I still haven’t found and alternative to:
Alternative for TIKZPICTURES
Easily the most powerful diagram making package I have encountered. It could easily make your diagrams look precise and could do a surprisingly complex diagrams easily. HTML Canvases just isn’t as powerful (Unless I find a very powerful JavaScript library).
Looking at if I could export single TeX files into a PNG/SVG file however, I
have found that I have been using the whole \input, \include work flow of
latex completely wrong! So I guess diagrams could be made using single .tex
files! Image files are supposed to be independent of the content after all :)
Now, if there is only a WYSIWYG editor for tikz…
Conclusion
There is still a lot of work needed for making the slides: writing the CSS themes, defining snippets that work with the themes in atom, writing scripts that make deploying more simple. But I think this has quite a lot of potential to be my platform of choice for a long time to come!