

What Does HN Recommend for Presentation Slide Creation - andrewvc

I'm going to be making a presentation at the next LA HN meetup, and I just realized that I haven't had to make slides in ages. What software do my fellow coders recommend? I run Ubuntu, but would prefer something web based if at all possible.
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_delirium
I usually use LaTeX with one of the presentation packages, but if you don't
already use/like LaTeX or have significant math, it might not be worth the
effort.

Prezi has lately been getting a lot of use at various conferences. Initially
Prezi presentations got a lot of positive reception just for the novelty, but
I think it's used enough these days that that part might be diminishing.
<http://prezi.com/>

OO Impress and Google Docs presentations are fine for relatively simple
things. OO Impress can probably do more complex things too, but I find it sort
of clunky to use.

I actually did one presentation in just some hand-coded HTML with prev/next
buttons. One advantage to that approach is that you can fairly easily include
editable, executable .js code examples.

~~~
eldila
Yeah, I would use Latex with the beamer-latex package.

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thaumaturgy
I have had good luck with 280Slides: <http://www.280slides.com/>

But, don't expect the site to be completely without quirks. Leave yourself
plenty of time to put the slides together, and export a file before your
presentation just in case. I did have a little trouble getting their software
to work occasionally.

~~~
andrewvc
I was trying to remember the name of this site, and my google-fu was failing
me. Thanks!

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johnpignata
I recommend slidedown - <http://github.com/nakajima/slidedown>. It processes
markdown into great looking HTML slides that have code highlighting via
pygments. I used it recently for a JavaScript presentation -
<http://jpignata.github.com/jasmine-bkjs>

~~~
andrewvc
This looks quite interesting, I just may try this.

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staunch
Google Docs is really great for me. Might be too bare bones for some people
though.

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scorpion032
The way to do a presentation has changed a lot. The way you do it today is
with a image and a caption to explain the idea, when you are explaining the
idea; and when you are describing a code snippet embed it.

Obviously you iterate over the process. If you do it in powerpoint or keynote,
it sucks. Are you manually going to copy paste the code every time?

Use latex with beamer class. Even tho' it is old, when customized, it _is_
still the best way to do presentations.

<shameless plug>

I created a (what I believe is) awesome presntation:
[http://www.slideshare.net/scorpion032/building-pluggable-
web...](http://www.slideshare.net/scorpion032/building-pluggable-web-
applications-using-django)

using Beamer class and here are the custom commands used:
[http://github.com/becomingGuru/gids-django-
ppt/blob/master/c...](http://github.com/becomingGuru/gids-django-
ppt/blob/master/contents.tex)

</shameless plug>

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mtodd
There's Scott Chacon's interesting approach to presentations called ShowOff:
<http://github.com/schacon/showoff>

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carpdiem
If it's simple, then just about anything (including Google Docs) will do fine
for you.

But if you have a complex presentation, or you're a stickler for detail, I
recommend creating each of your slides in Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator, and
stitching them together with something else. It's the only way to get the
design _just_ right.

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JoachimSchipper
What kind of presentation? _I_ would strongly recommend LaTeX-based stuff
(specifically, powerdot), but my presentations tend to involve quite a bit of
mathematics...

~~~
andrewvc
There's going to be code, only JS and Ruby though. I'd rather not have to
learn latex for this to be honest. I just need simple slides, with code, and
maybe a picture or two.

Perhaps I'm over thinking this and should just use Google docs.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
LaTeX is cool, but it's probably a bit more than you need. In this specific
case, you may want to go with something browser-based - you could actually
execute the Javascript!

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dunstad
I've presented before using html/css files. Normally I'd have used Google
Docs, but formatting the code separately was too difficult.

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steveklabnik
I really enjoy Keynote, if you were on a Mac.

When I used Linux, I just used the Google Documents presentation maker.

