
Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown - chivalrous
https://github.com/googlesamples/md2googleslides
======
nkantar
When this comes up, I always feel obligated to share my favorite Markdown
presentation tool, the command-line mdp:
[https://github.com/visit1985/mdp](https://github.com/visit1985/mdp)

~~~
aban
I'd also like to share patat [0], a Pandoc-based presentation tool written in
Haskell.

One of the nice things about patat using Pandoc is that the input file format
can be any of the ones supported by Pandoc (e.g. rST, Org, LaTeX, etc).

[0]: [https://github.com/jaspervdj/patat](https://github.com/jaspervdj/patat)

~~~
nkantar
patat looks a lot more comprehensive than mdp—thanks for sharing!

------
dangom
Emacs users may also want to check out org-reveal[1], which enables export
from org-mode to reveal.js presentations with 0 hassle.

[1] [https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal](https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal)

~~~
kozikow
What's more, org mode offers export to other presentation formats (for example
latex-beaker).

org-reveal indeed looks the most pleasant and I use it to create my
presentations.

------
gield
Very neat!

Just in case you don't know: something similar [0] exists for LaTeX, except it
produces PDFs instead of Google Slides.

[0]
[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Presentations](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Presentations)

~~~
z1mm32m4n
In fact, you can use Pandoc along side that feature of LaTeX to go straight
from Markdown to PDF slides:

    
    
        pandoc slides.md -t beamer -o slides.pdf
    

It works pretty effortlessly, especially when you pair it with a set of
starter files like can be found in this project[1].

[https://github.com/jez/pandoc-starter](https://github.com/jez/pandoc-starter)

------
skun
This looks great! Textual interfaces to presentations are an absolute pleasure
to use.

The one i've been using for a while now is Marp [0]. Found it to be fast,
straightforward and quite powerful :)

[0]: [https://yhatt.github.io/marp/](https://yhatt.github.io/marp/)

------
mhandley
There have been a number of tools to generate HTML-based slides from simple
ASCII text. 20 years ago, I was a fan of Magicpoint:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicPoint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicPoint)

My recollection is that Magicpoint was really good for drafting the first
version of a presentation, where you shouldn't be thinking about how it looks,
but rather about what the content flow is. But fine tuning of good looking
presentations was not its forte.

~~~
AlexCoventry
org-reveal is a great modern text-to-HTML-slides tool, and its results don't
need much tweaking.

------
mikrowave
Use with impress.js
([http://impress.github.io/impress.js/](http://impress.github.io/impress.js/))
and you have possibilities * 1000

~~~
ericbn
Amazing, cooler than Prezi (and free)!

------
derwildemomo
Along those lines there's also Deckset [0], which is focused on turning
"boring" markdown notes to visually appealing presentations. I've used it once
or twice and really like the idea. It's only available for Mac (afaik)
though..

[0]: [http://www.decksetapp.com](http://www.decksetapp.com)

------
sandGorgon
This is awesome! For two reasons - I am very PowerPoint challenged : i dont
fit in very naturally with a mouse-click-drag based workflow. I would much
ratger have an automatic layout alignment by another tool... rather than spend
time trying to align or even understand visual cues.

Second - Im excited about the possibility that you/someone can fit this into
Hugo/Jekyll and have three output targets: powerpoint, google slides, static
websites. Too much fantastic content is locked up in Google Slides/Powerpoint
and would love to unlock it.

If this were a Hugo plugin (which we already use) . . . I would pay for this.

------
gunmania0
Another great markdown->slides project is madoko
[https://www.madoko.net/](https://www.madoko.net/) . Also really good for
writing markdown based latex papers.

~~~
sah2ed
The text is overflowing the margins on pages 13 - 15 in the sample [1] linked
to from the madoko site.

[1] [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/daan/madoko/sa...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/daan/madoko/samples/effects/out/effects.pdf)

------
walterbell
On iOS, makeslides [0] will convert markdown or OPML (mind map) text nodes to
a Powerpoint file. There's zero style formatting, but you can open PPT in
Keynote or Powerpoint for styling. Unfortunately, Keynote on iOS does not
allow styles/themes to be applied to an existing presentation file - you will
need a PC for final editing.

[0] [http://toketaware.com/makeslides/](http://toketaware.com/makeslides/)

------
agjmills
Can someone explain why you would want to make slides from markdown? Surely
its just as straightforward, if not easier, just to use the UI - genuinely
curious

~~~
thenomad
Not always.

Having done this a fair bit, I've often found that if I have a somewhat
minimal template (perhaps haven't gotten to the design stage of a talk and I'm
just fleshing out the content of the slides), it's far slower to fire up a GUI
and make 50-odd slides than it is to write a Markdown document.

Example:

\---

#This is a headline

##This is my subhead.

* And * Some * bullets

\---

That took me 14 seconds. Creating a new slide, 3 textboxes, and adding in the
text in a GUI would take me significantly longer. And that multiplies up for
each slide.

That's particularly true if I'm having to produce a lot of similar slideshows,
for an extended course or something similar.

In that case, Markdown -> Powerpoint or similar tools are an absolute godsend.

~~~
qznc
Slides with bullets are an anti-pattern. Markdown encourages that. Thus,
Powerpoint > Markdown.

~~~
AlexCoventry
What's the drawback to bullets?

~~~
qznc
Peter Norvig illustrated that quite well:
[http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/](http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/)

~~~
AlexCoventry
The objectives of the Gettysburg Address were entirely political and did not
require the audience to keep track of detailed information with complex
interactions.

I was at a talk by Norvig recently. I can't remember whether his slides had
bullet points, but there were definitely series of single-sentence, loosely
related paragraphs. So he might have changed his mind, or you might have
missed the point.

------
Cub3
Wow this is exactly what i've been looking for, can you select slide themes
with this library?

~~~
thewhitetulip
you would like
[http://impress.github.io/impress.js/](http://impress.github.io/impress.js/)

------
Dowwie
Check out remarkjs:
[https://github.com/gnab/remark](https://github.com/gnab/remark)

I like to toggle to presenter mode in this presentation by pressing the 'p'
key. This reveals the presenter's notes and a time counter. Other keyboard
shortcuts are available from the README.

Also, you can use it as a hugo theme: [https://github.com/sporto/hugo-
remark](https://github.com/sporto/hugo-remark)

------
rjzzleep
Personally, I recently forced myself to use org mode for various project
management tasks. There is a html5 presenter integrated afair, but I quite
like the google io type slide generator [1]

It looks nice, it works well, and you can use all sorts of exporters with org
anyway.

[1] [https://github.com/coldnew/org-ioslide](https://github.com/coldnew/org-
ioslide)

------
everlost
This is pretty neat! I've been thinking of having a goal of writing one
article + presentation every month, and this is the perfect workflow to
accomplish both - write the article draft in markdown format, and then run
this tool when ready to publish.

Curious about a couple of things:

1\. Is there a way to add notes to the presentation?

2\. Is the {.big} notation standard markdown, or something specific to this
tool?

------
sah2ed
While we are on the topic of generating output from markdown, anyone know of a
great tool for generating good looking (GitHub-Flavored) PDF/Word documents
from markdown? Hyperlinks should be clickable too.

I know of markdown2pdf [1] but the output can sometimes come out looking
bland.

[1] [http://markdown2pdf.com/](http://markdown2pdf.com/)

~~~
jstrieb
Pandoc?

[http://pandoc.org/](http://pandoc.org/)

~~~
sah2ed
Tried pandoc before but I had trouble with missing dependencies (on Windows).
When I tried it on Linux the output didn't look great.

Ideally, would love something that mimicked GitHub Flavored Markdown in
output.

------
m3andros
I love this! I didn't know I needed this until I saw it. It was a breeze to
set up and be up and running.

One small question: does anyone know how to add a color background to a slide
(as in the example provided) - is it done with CSS?

------
slara
generator-reveal[0] and generator-impress[1] adds live-reload, themes and more
for Reveal.js and Impress.js using HTML or Markdown

[0]: [https://github.com/slara/generator-
reveal](https://github.com/slara/generator-reveal)

[1]: [https://github.com/slara/generator-
impress](https://github.com/slara/generator-impress)

------
macco
I don't get it. Markdown is text markup language. Slides shouldn't have much
text (best: none), but should be visually appealing.

I don't think a text editor is the right interface for that.

~~~
MrQuincle
I'm terrible in visuals. I rather provide the raw content and someone else
makes it beautiful.

For a team page that's pictures of the team and their roles.

For a product it is pictures from my product designer. Or specs that might be
put in a nice looking table.

For user scenarios it is photos again, but with a caption. And yes, if I do it
myself that caption will look ugly.

So text templates are super useful to me. I'm also much better in using icons
than designing them. :-)

~~~
qznc
It is not that hard. You just have to refrain from some dangerous features
like colors and different fonts.

[http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/slide_design_programmers.html](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/slide_design_programmers.html)

------
joe-mccann
dillinger.io for drafting markdown

