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Ask HN: HTML-based presentation tools
1 point by davidroetzel on June 20, 2012 | hide | past | favorite
I am looking for an HTML-based presentation tool for classic slide-based presentations.

As news about this kind of tools pop up on hn from time to time, I thought people here might have some experience with them.

I spent quite some time evaluating different options, but have not yet found the ideal solution for my purposes.

I need the following features:

a) It should look beautiful. I really like the looks of shower (https://github.com/pepelsbey/shower). But the project does not have to look like that. It would be sufficient if slides could be easily styled via CSS. Of course, a set of gorgeous built-in designs would be a big plus.

b) Slides should be defined in a simple markup language. My first tries involved writing a preprocessor so I could define my slides in HAML. But I realized this might not have been the best idea. So Markdown or something similar would be fine as well. Bonus points if you can easily split up your presentation in several files and a tool automatically combines them.

c) I need to print handouts from my slides, 4 slides on a single page. This has been painful in the past no matter what tools I used. If I gain only one thing from this, it should be fully-automated handout generation. I have seen approaches using wkhtmltopdf to accomplish this, but this has some serious issues. By the way, I do not expect the printed slides to look anything like the HTML ones. They just need to have the same contents and the numbering needs to be the same.

d) I need a slide overview (menu) to quickly change between slides. Deck.js and shower both have this.

e) Syntax highlighting, ideally supporting a wide range of Ruby and Rails related syntaxes (.rb, .erb, .yml, .js, .coffee, .haml and so on). This does not have to be part of the system as long as I can easily integrate a JS solution such as SyntaxHighlighter.

There are so many promising frameworks, libs or tools out there that have 3-4 of those features. But do you know one that has all five?




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