On 6/29/2010 7:42 AM, Nick wrote:
On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 12:34:52PM +0200, Uriel wrote:
I'm looking for a minimally sane way to generate presentation slides,
ideally using something similar to markdown and capable of generating
decent-looking html (and hopefully) pdf.
S5 looks quite decent. I haven't used it, but I found the HTML/JS
output is suprisingly usable.
I tried making some slides with S5, but quickly found that making even
moderately complex layouts (anything more than a bulleted list with
maybe a single figure) was horribly complex. Admittedly I have almost no
knowledge of (x)html/js/css, so I just tried to hack the layouts using
tables, and maybe that was the problem. But to me it seems more likely
that presentations are just inherently visual things that are conceived
in one's head visually and should be described to the computer visually.
This is in contrast to prose documents, which I think are conceived
structurally and therefore are easiest to describe using text-based
structural markup. The page in a prose document usually does not delimit
conceptual chunks, whereas the slide in a presentation does.
Therefore I think the way to make a good presentation authoring program
is to add structure to graphics, rather than add graphics to structure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S5_%28file_format%29
Presumably, a little Makefile (and maybe a little sed/shell/rc)
could do the necessary Markdown translation.
Nick
