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text-slides

Write your slides with markdown, include images from keynote, write diagrams using mermaid and automatically extract source code from your presentation. text-slides relies on pandoc for producing your slides but adds additional features through various plugins.

Usage

See sample-talk.md for a showcase of all features that text-slides adds to pandoc. See here for the documentation of the markdown syntax in general, the CommonMark and github extensions are also supported.

To generate a HTML version of your presentation, use

text-slides example/sample-talk.md

To render it as PDF slide show use

text-slides --pdf example/sample-talk.md

To render the input markdown as an article use

text-slides --input-mode article --pdf example/sample-talk.md

To force rendering as an article, you can also set inputMode:yes in the first yaml meta block of the .md file.

Plugins

Plugins reuse the syntax of code fences, where a code fence starts and ends with ~~~ on a separate line. A plugin call looks like this:

~~~PLUGIN_NAME(ARG_LIST)
BODY
~~~

Or, for plugins without body, like this:

~~~PLUGIN_NAME(ARG_LIST)

To be more flexible with respect to syntax highlighting in certain editors, you can write calls without bodies also like this:

~~~PLUGIN_NAME(ARG_LIST) ~~~

or

~~~PLUGIN_NAME(ARG_LIST)
~~~

If the ARG_LIST is empty, the paranthesis can be omitted.

The ARG_LIST is a comma-separated list of key-value arguments. Each argument has the form key: value, where value can be a string like "some string", a number like 42 or a boolean false or true.

Here is a list of the supported plugins.

Code plugins

Syntax highlighting and code extraction for various languages. Currently, the following languages are supported:

  • bash
  • c
  • cs (C#)
  • css
  • clojure
  • erlang
  • fsharp
  • html
  • haskell
  • json
  • java
  • javascript
  • typescript
  • ocaml
  • objectivec
  • python
  • rust
  • scheme
  • xml

If your language of choice is not part of this list, but mentioned in the output of pandoc --list-highlight-languages, it is easy to add support for this language to text-slides.

All code plugins support the following arguments:

  • file (optional string): the path where the extracted code is placed. Default: YOUR_PRESENTATION.EXT if your presentation is placed in the file YOUR_PRESENTATION.md and EXT is the extension of the language you have choosen. The path is interpreted relative to build/plugins/LANGUAGE.
  • mode (optional string): one of "show", "hide" or "showOnly". The default is "show": the code is displayed on the slides and extracted. Mode "hide" extracts the code but does not show it on the slides, "showOnly" shows the code on the slides but does not extract it.
  • lineNumbers (optional string): one of "on", "off" or "auto". The default is "auto": line numbers are printed if the code is more than 5 lines long.
  • firstLine (optional string or int): determines the starting line number. An int simply sets the number of the first line. The string "continue" resumes line numbering where the last code block left off.
  • place (optional string): determines where in the output file the code is placed. The default is "here", which respects to ordering of the code snippets in the markdown file. "atEnd" place the code snippet at the of the code file, if several snippets are marked with "atEnd", then their ordering in the markdown file is preservered. Similarly, "atStart" places the code snippet at the beginning of the code file.
  • comment (optional bool): if true (the default being false), the code is exported as a comment to the file.

If mode is "show" (the default), certain parts of the code can be hidden from the presentation. This can be done by writing the following line somewhere in your code:

# ~~~hide

All code from this line on is now hidden in the presentation. To show code again, use the following line:

# ~~~show

(Clearly, the comment character may vary for you language.)

Example

~~~python(file: "foo.py", mode: "hide")
print("Hello World!")
~~~

Writes the code to build/plugins/python/foo.py and hides it from the presentation.

See section "More code plugins" for how to configure additional code plugins.

keynote

Converts a keynote presentation into a set of images and includes one of the images in the presentation.

Supported arguments:

  • file (required string): path to the keynote presentation.
  • slide (required int): number of the slide (numbering starts at 1).
  • width (optional int or string): width of the image (either in pixel or percentage)
  • height (optional int or string): height of the image (either in pixel or percentage)
  • center (optional bool): whether to center the image

Example:

~~~keynote(file: "my_presentation.key", slide: 2)

Shows the second slide of the presentation my_presentation.key.

mermaid

Draw diagrams with a textual format, render the diagrams as images and include them in your presentation. Arguments:

  • width (optional int): width of the generated image
  • height (optional int): height of the generated image

Example:

~~~mermaid
sequenceDiagram
    participant Alice
    participant Bob
    Alice->>John: Hello John, how are you?
    loop Healthcheck
        John->>John: Fight against hypochondria
    end
    Note right of John: Rational thoughts <br/>prevail!
    John-->>Alice: Great!
    John->>Bob: How about you?
    Bob-->>John: Jolly good!
~~~

Installation

  • Clone this repository
  • Run stack install

Requirements

  • stack, a build tool for Haskell.
  • pandoc
  • For including images from keynote, you need python3, the appscript library, and the convert commandline tool from ImageMagick.
  • For writing diagrams with mermaid, you need mermaid: npm install -g @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

Configuration

Header file for beamer presentations

You can specify files to be included in the header of the latex file for beamer presentations, see Pandoc's --include-in-header option. The files can be specified in the following three ways, all files found are included.

  • Command line flag --beamer-header FILE.
  • A file named beamer-header.tex in the same directory as the input file.
  • Through the file $HOME/.text-slides/beamer-header.tex.

Header file for HTML presentations

You can specify a file to be included in the header of the HTML file for beamer presentations, see Pandoc's --include-in-header option. The file can be specified in the following three ways:

  • Command line flag --html-header FILE.
  • A file named html-header.tex in the same directory as the input file.
  • Through the file $HOME/.text-slides/html-header.tex.

Lua filters

You can specify a file defining lua filters for pandoc, see Pandoc's --lua-filter option. The file can be specified in the following three ways:

  • Command line flag --lua-filter FILE.
  • A file named pandoc-filter.lua in the same directory as the input file.
  • Through the file $HOME/.text-slides/pandoc-filter.lua.

More code plugins

The file $HOME/.text-slides/code.json lists additional code plugins. Here is an example:

{ "languages": [
    { "name": "python-repl",
      "syntaxFile": "syntax/python-repl.xml", // optional, resolved relatively to $HOME/.text-slides
      "extension": ".py",
      "commentStart": "#"
      // "commentEnd" is optional
    }
    # add more language definitions here
  ]
}

The syntax file is a KDE syntax definition file.

Syntax highlighting themes

Pandoc comes with a couple of builtin themes for syntax highlighting. The default used by text-slides is the pygments theme. Here's how to use a different theme:

  • Use the commandline option --syntax-theme=NAME_OF_THEME|FILE.
  • Place the definition of your theme in syntax-highlighting.theme, in the same directory as the input file.
  • Place the definition of your theme in $HOME/.text-slides/syntax-highlighting.theme.

For a theme include with pandoc, you can save to definition to a file with this command: pandoc --print-highlight-style NAME_OF_THEME > FILE

Variables

The markdown content may use variables like this: ``{{variableName}}`

The values of the variables are defined in a file INPUT.yaml, where INPUT.md is the name of the input file or in a file text-slides.yaml or in a file ../text-slides.yaml.

Structuring Code

Java

  • Use ~~~java(file:"SomeClassName.java) to put java code into an extra file.
  • Use ~~~java(body:true) states that the content of the code block is a method body. That is, the code is wrapped with a method and a class.
    • Variation: ~~~java(body:"foo") introduces identifer foo for the code block. All blocks with the same identifier are put in the same method.
  • Use ~~~java(method:true) states that the content of the code block is a method. That is, the code is wrapped with a class.

Performance

To speed up PDF generation, supply a custom latex header (see above) and insert the command \endofdump at the end. text-slides then uses mylatexformat to "precompile" the preamble. In my Macbook Pro (2019), this gave a speed up of about 1s.