

Show HN: Automatic feedback on improving your PowerPoint slides - edmack
http://sketch-deck.com/rater

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edmack
For people lucky enough without real slides to put into the rater, it looks
like this:

[http://imgur.com/SSvMQ2N](http://imgur.com/SSvMQ2N)

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Robadob
The images for each rating didn't load for me, possibly my ad-blocker screwing
up. Closed it now so can't easily check.

~~~
edmack
Yeah, apologies about that - we've had a mime type issue with our node server
that's broken the icons in some browsers

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cleis
This looks cool, but how does it actually work?

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edmack
It takes your slides (PPTX format), and analyses each one a bunch of ways, to
spot common pitfalls. For example, it checks the reading age, how busy the
slides are, how colourful (or not) your colour palette is. It also checks if
you put too much text on each slide.

It's not fool proof, but is surprisingly accurate for various slide-fails :D

~~~
sp332
Here are some formulas for calculating readability for a text:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability#The_popular_readab...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability#The_popular_readability_formulas)

~~~
edmack
Neat - we roughly implement the Fog algorithm

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glitchdout
I wonder how it would score the NSA slides.

~~~
edmack
It judges the reading age is too old and there is too much text and bullet
points :)

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robinhoodexe
Any support for Beamer?

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yoha
PDF is a monstruosity. Having the same functionality on it would takes weeks
if not months of development. It would be possible to parse a .tex Beamer
though.

~~~
Cynddl
Well, the bullet check is easily feasible. "Too much text" and "difficult
words" too.

Check
[https://github.com/johnwhitington/camlpdf](https://github.com/johnwhitington/camlpdf),
which does a really good job to parse PDF files properly.

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wmbobbitt
This is pure genius

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louisbur
Nicely done!

