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by belzsch 2604 days ago
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned pandoc by now. It’s a Swiss army knife that among other things makes slides from Markdown documents and lets you pick from a number of JS templates or Latex/Beamer. Converting Markdown to PDF slides is just a simple-ish oneliner away.

And terrific for a whole number of other use cases, too - including but not limited to Markdown <-> Word, Epub conversion, HTML conversion and endless others. I find myself turning to it all the time.

https://pandoc.org/

3 comments

Used pandoc for a couple presentations recently and while it's clear the experience will be wonderful eventually, it's still a bit buggy. There is no widescreen template included with Pandoc and attempts to use other templates caused me to encounter https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/5402 . The resulting .pptx files won't open in Keynote, either, but luckily they did open in Google Slides, which then let me download a visually-identical .pptx that opens everywhere. Point is, slide support in Pandoc is still somewhat new and people should not go in expecting a trouble-free experience at this point.
I love pandoc, and I would love it even more if it had full support for LaTeX math. Unfortunately, the math support is very primitive (meaning, I cannot copy-paste maths from my LaTeX paper and expect it to work and look correct once converted to html, even with the mathjax option). I spend a weekend trying to hack the haskell code to correct a few problems, but it got to nothing.
I use pandoc to output revealjs presentations when I want to present web things (with links, videos or gifs). And it is good as I have some teaching content that I use in webpages, in presentation and for print.

Presentation notes kind of work, but I don't like them (in general, not just for revealjs)?