

Ask HN: Text-based PPT alternative? - joeclark77

Is there any good way to generate slide presentations from text files?  I&#x27;d like to be able to push my presentations to GitHub as text, so that I can see changes from one version to the next and so on.  Is LaTeX the answer?  Somebody&#x27;s got to have wanted to do this before me...
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webmaven
There are a bunch of solutions for creating S5, Impress.js, Reveal.js, etc.
from Markdown or ReStructuredText:

[http://docs.hieroglyph.io/en/latest/](http://docs.hieroglyph.io/en/latest/)

[https://hovercraft.readthedocs.org/en/1.0/](https://hovercraft.readthedocs.org/en/1.0/)

[https://github.com/yoshiki/markdown2impress](https://github.com/yoshiki/markdown2impress)

[https://github.com/gnab/remark](https://github.com/gnab/remark)

[https://github.com/jdan/cleaver/](https://github.com/jdan/cleaver/)

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vitovito
[http://decksetapp.com/](http://decksetapp.com/) does this from Markdown.

If you don't need actual PPT/PDF/etc. slide generation, and don't mind writing
HTML, S5 was one of the original standards to do this; there are plenty of
others, now: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-
based_slideshow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_slideshow)

~~~
joeclark77
Deckset looks great. Not great enough for me to switch to a Mac, but great.

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itazula
On a Mac, I like tpp, which can be found at
[https://github.com/cbbrowne/tpp](https://github.com/cbbrowne/tpp). I
installed it using Homebrew (brew install tpp), which will install the
necessary Ruby dependencies. Optionally, for huge letters, you'll need FIGlet
(brew install figlet).

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anonymouz
I usually go the LaTeX+Beamer route, since LaTeX is what I work with anyway
and I usually need LaTeX's math typesetting. Another option is MagicPoint [1],
but I have never personally used it.

[1] [http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/mgp/](http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/mgp/)

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brudgers
The Slideshow language in the Racket ecosystem: [http://docs.racket-
lang.org/slideshow/index.html](http://docs.racket-
lang.org/slideshow/index.html)

One of the authors is Matthew Flatt, and he wrote it despite knowing LaTeX
well.

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dangowango
Latex is pretty great. Use the Beamer packege. However, its drawback is that
all slides look very similar, and it's very time-consuming to experiment with
discrete slide layouts.

For most users I'd say this is one of the few scenarios where you really
really want a graphical editor.

~~~
dangowango
But i totally agree with the need for a github for ppt (and other binary
files, like doc, etc!)

~~~
joeclark77
I'd be happy if they could just show the contents on the website (or even if
they could show PDFs) so that you don't have to click "View Raw" to access
them.

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walterbell
Try [http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) and
[http://gitprint.com](http://gitprint.com)

~~~
joeclark77
GitPrint is really cool, I used it today in class to make my course syllabus
printable. Thanks for the tip!

