Presentations with Markdown: revealjs

Being an active contributor to the PiAndMore and other conferences, I happen to make quite a few presentations a year. In the past I was using the good old Microsoft Powerpoint - which has its strengths, but also its drawbacks. Positioning text and graphics were never my taste (I use LaTeX, btw) - so I set out to find a new way to create presentations - and found revealjs back in 2018.

What is revealjs? Basically: Write your presentations in Markdown. Show in a Webbrowser - or export as PDF. TL;DR? Navigate through the demo.

However, using revealjs by its own was cumbersome, I was missing a live preview - and while all of this was available at its freemium service slides.com - I do not want to be dependant on online connection - nor share every presentation with the world (some might involve senstive data... so no).

That was when I started to use hacker-slides - a small Go implementation for all OS types, with a Live Preview, local/offline usage. It was near perfect, other than issues like having problems with carriage return and similar signs at some points (usage other Windows...) and some other stuff (I lost some presentations when I opened up too many at the same time and edited different presentations in different tabs). It was also the first project where I changed some Go code for my local copy. However, the final nail in the coffin was that this project is not really maintained anymore.

Enter vscode-reveal - it works in VSCode or Codium - has live preview and all the features you need. Your basic, local, revealjs powered, operating system independant presentation-making-machine.

I have used it for the latest PiAndMore - and I am not going back to anything else (at least for the time being) - so maybe you want to give it a try?

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