slipshow

[!WARNING]

Slipshow is under heavy modifications: it now includes a compiler from markdown to a standalone slipshow presentation!

The documentation isn't yet up-to-date. You can have at look at sliphub.choum.net for some preliminary information.

Slipshow is a tool specifically designed for technical presentations where traditional slides are not enough.

In a slipshow presentation, the equivalent of a slide is called a slip. Each slip is like a slide, but with no bottom limit. That is, the content can be arbitrarily long! During the presentation, the camera will "scroll" down to reveal the hidden content, following a script given by the presenter!

Here are the goals of slipshow, in no specific orders:

• Lift restrictions from traditional slide-based presentation. In particular, make it closer to a blackboard presentation!
• Easy to write and readable syntax: markdown with few extensions. No manual placement like in powerpoint. No crazy syntax like in latex.
• Source of the presentation is plain text: much better for source control, sharing with people, using your favorite editor, readability, compatibility.
• Open the possibility for a dynamic presentation. Watching scientific popularization video demonstrates how well-chosen animations can make a difficult subject more understandable.

Slipshow compiles files written in an extension of markdown, to a standalone html file viewable offline in any web browser.

If you want to see it in action, go to the example section. If you want to start writing your presentation, go to Quick start. Click for the full documentation and API, or continue reading to know more about this project!

The issue with traditional slides

When using traditional slides, you are given a rectangle of white space to express your though. When this rectangle is full, you have no other choice than erasing everything, and start again with a new white rectangle.

This can be a problem both for the viewer and the presenter. If the viewer took some time understanding the beginning of the slide, they might miss the last part of a slide: everything will be erased before they have a chance to read it and catch up. And indeed, there is an obvious asymetry: the last part of a slide will be visible much shorter than the first part!

The presenter might want to show three information (1, 2 and 3), each requiring the previous one to be visible on screen. However, all three information might not fit in one screen! When the first two are visible, it is necessary to... start again with a fresh slide, while we would like to keep information 2 visible.

Of course, for many kind of presentation, with very few content in the slide, this is not a problem at all. However, for some of them, it can be quite an issue! Having had many courses on various technical subjects (mostly math and computer science), I can see how slides degraded the experience from a blackboard presentation.

By having the presentation "scroll down", to reveal new space usable by the presenter, without hiding everything. This is much closer to what happens with a blackboard: the presenter can erase half of it, and continue with the new free space! And a viewer a little bit late still has a chance to catchup, since half of the information is still there.

Examples

You can find several example of slip presentation, from different versions of slip. As they were from early stage of developpement, looking at the source code can be helpful but many things may have changed. Only the official example, tutorial and documentation are kept up to date.

• The slips to present slip
• The slips of my thesis (old version of the engine)

Tutorial, API and Documentation

You can find an extensive documentation, with a tutorial at the readthedocs documentation.

Quick start

For a super quick start, just click visit sliphub.choum.net to start writing a presentation online.

For using slipshow offline, you'll need to install the slipshow tool. Currently, there are several ways to get it:

# For opam users. TODO: make it work! Release it to opam!
$ opam pin slipshow [e-mail]/panglesd/slipshow.git

# For npm users
$ npm install -g slipshow

Then, you can use the slipshow binary to compile a .md file to a slipshow presentation:

# Compile file.md into file.html:
$ slipshow -o file.html file.md

# Watch for changes in the file, automatically recompiling:
$ slipshow -o file.html file.md --watch

# Watch for changes in the file, automatically recompiling and hot-reloadind the opened presentation:
$ slipshow -o file.html file.md --serve

Your ready to go! Have a look at the syntax, or the full tutorial for a more gentle introduction.

Contributing

You can issue a Pull Request of any kind, report a bug, ask for a new feature, suggest or PR an enhancement on the documentation... You can also write a theme.

License

MIT