For me, slides are like art. I make slides with graphics, with weird arrows, boxes and call outs, images tiled in a particular way, and many custom things. They're more graphical than textual because slides aren't about people reading them - they're already listening to you and simultaneously listening + reading is difficult for the audience. Slides should show visual relationships of your talking points. Use graphics to show architecture, hierarchy, dependencies, etc. Use images to give context. Can it be done programmatically? Sure, if I spend 4 hours customizing my code. I'd rather fire up Powerpoint or Google Slides and roll with it. Also, I present once a quarter, I never found these automatic slide generators useful but I presume if you're presenting concise/textual information often, it can be useful.
There are many different situations/users where decks can be used and the one you describe is just one of them.
If you present few times a year in important events, sure, you'd better using a tool that allows pushing every single pixels because it makes sense for your situation and you have time/skills for.
But if you need to produce (many) documents for reports/lessons/references maybe you'd prefer something that automate a bit more and because you're not interested spending time to invent graphics design.
Also, what you say about images vs text, again, you're right when you're making a show. If you present information that needs to be understood very well, I can assure you that words and (short) sentences displayed when you're speaking, can help a tons.
I would argue that, if you need to have long-form text to explain your content (even if it's only a short sentence or two), then a live presentation is the wrong format for delivering that information. Live presentations simply aren't a good medium for conveying dense information to an unfamiliar and/or varied audience.
I also think people don't have a good appreciation for the time asymmetries in the presentations they give. How big is your audience? If you want to make the case that "it's not worth my time to put together a better presentation", then you have to multiply every minute of your presentation prep by the total number of people you're presenting to. If you're delivering metrics to a company-wide monthly town hall meeting, and 10 minutes prepping saves you 1 minute of presentation, or 10 minutes of layout work saves you 1 minute of comprehension, then no, it's not worth your time, but it's absolutely worth the company's time.
> If you present information the needs to be understood very well, I can assure you that words and (short) sentences displayed when you're speaking, can help a tons.
I have a lot of problems with this. What kind of information are you talking about? Surely you're not suggesting explaining a simple trendline with short sentences is better than a graph? And even assuming you have something where a textual representation is the best choice, how you display that text on a slide absolutely can and does have a very real impact in uptake. Are you making a slide with nothing on it except a single number as a 12-point bullet at the top left? Taking an extra 60 seconds to increase the font size and center it on the page is going to drastically increase readability.
Listen, I understand this stuff takes time, and not everyone has that time. I have a lot of sympathy for being frustrated at how slow our software tools are. And (even though I still do it!), I absolutely hate how tedious it is to push those pixels around to put together a visually coherent presentation. You say outright that the reason you don't push those pixels is because you're not interested in spending the time. That's what you should stick with, and it demonstrates a clear need for a presentation authoring tool that makes these kinds of things easy. But don't say you're doing it because it increases comprehension. You're not making a powerpoint completely out of bullet points because it makes the information easier to digest, you're doing it because you don't want to spend the time and effort to make it more digestible. And we need to be honest about that or nobody is going to bother making tools that make it better.
It looks like you’ve constructed your whole argument against something I didn’t write, that is, I’m against PPT, and I’m not!
I agree with every principles in your argument, but even in this case, this tool can beat PPT in SOME cases.
I need to create 2/3 decks per week for my students, decks with some words, images, links, code, video, interactive object, etc that I present to them and after that they use as handouts. I’ve tested many tools for this stuff (PPT included), thus, I know precisely the different pro’s and con’s.
Btw, to me “words” and “short sentense” are very different things than “long-form text” and “dense information”, sorry if that wasn’t clear, my fault.
For example, if you are teaching grammar. You want to highlight all verbs in red, all nouns in blue, and all adjectives in green. You cannot do this unless you resort to CSS. But in my opinion, the ability to highlight words and set font color with couple clicks is much more simpler.
A month ago I’ve released my very own open source project, followed by a bare-bones tool built on top of it.
I’ve listen a lot from the community and now, here a sensible update.
The most significant features are:
- not only plain-text but markdown, yaml, json and even javascript can be used to create slides!
- it’s possible to use local files and it can run offline (since it’s a pwa)
- it saves everything you do, locally
- you can share a presentation with one click
- better UX of the editor
Hope you find it useful and I’m open to feedback and suggestions.
Brilliant! Huge potential, but I'm not sure how this can be used like flowchart.js, js-sequence-diagram or mermaid in a documentation ecosystem. https://bwmarrin.github.io/MkDocsPlus/ has bundled these libraries already and something on that line would be really helpful
The comment/suggestion was different: ability to embed presentation inside a documentation ecosystem like MkDocs (similar to mermaid), optionally with unique URL--and also without external hosting.
I've added a couple of props in the script, you can set the same values present in the dropdown menu in Play tool. Fullscreen can be activating by pressing 'f' on a specific presentation.
Btw I might add a more explicit UI, though.
Out of curiosity, does MkDoc parse correctly the whole content without actually parsing the chunk for Presenta?
I stopped using PowerPoint for presentations long back. What I use now is LaTeX with the beamer class to make classy professional looking presentations. This looks like another good alternative to try out.
You might also like "marp", which works as a VS Code plugin for markdown. Much simpler & less control than Beamer, but does allow equations (which it seems the linked presenta.cc does not, or not yet) and a bit more off-line focused perhaps?
I'm more of an offline-first person but I love how simple this is. If the need arises I'd consider it for sure. Looks like all my use cases are ticked off as well.
Quick question: is latex/mathematica/any other way to include equations possible? (excluding equation images obviously; needs to be editable)
It's definitely possible with a dedicated plugin of the open source library [1]. When there'll be one available, I can consider to include it in the tool as well.
I like the idea, and the technical implementation. I frequently need something simple and free to create slides. I think the typography in the rendered slides could be improved a bit, with some more careful attention to margins and sizes.
The left and right arrow are the same blue color as the background. Should probably add some function to make sure that if the defined color is the same or similar to that of the stuff it is on, then darken, lighten, invert or something.
figma can also be used to make slides. if you get hang of it, auto layout and controlled components make it a breeze to maintain consistency across slide.
