present
a tool to create powerful yet simple presentations from plain-text source files.
present is similar to latex+beamer, but the syntax is much smaller than latex, thus the compilation time is lesser than latex+beamer. present does not believe in providing options to the presenter, as that allows them to mess up the presentation. Keeping the slides clean and simple is the best way to make good slides, where the focus should be on the skills of the presenter and his oratory skills, not using fancy graphics.
For presentations you need two things per slide:
- text (2-3 sentences max)
- image
- title
anything else is just a distraction to the audience. It may look good aesthetically, but does not help the audience grasp the content any better.
Things that dont belong on a presentation:
- animations
- videos
- multiple images/vectors per slide
- long texts
If presenter requires need of using these, they most probably want a screen-sharing software instead of a presentation software, as the work of the presentation is to aid the presenter.
Things which may be required sometimes:
- lists (like this)
- links
these are incorporated inside the content rendering system using special syntax
Syntax
- A banner page (big title only) is marked by a '$' at the begining of a line. Any other component of that slide is ignored
- A title is marked by a '#' symbol at begining of a line
- An image is marked by a '!' symbol at the begining of the line
- A link is marked by a '@' symbol at the begining of the line
- A list is marked by a '-' symbol at the begining of the line
- Content is marked by starting the line without special symbols
New slides are delimited by an empty line. For each slide, the component should appear in the following order: title > image > content .
If any one the component is absent, it can be omitted. Each component should start in a new line. Only the content component can span multiple lines (and the output preserves those line-breaks). Content is wrapped if too big to fit in one line.
Lists and Links are part of content itself, and thus are only present at the end.
Example
$Presentation on Seasons
#What are seasons?
They are abstractions of long time-frame weather commonalities which repeat each
year for a particular geographic place on earth.
#How many do we have?
four or five depending on the part of the world you ask the question in.
#They are:
-Summer
-Winter
-Autumn
-Spring
-Monsoon
$How they look?
#Summer
!summer.png
#Winter
!winter.png
#Autumn
!autumn.png
#Spring
!spring.png
#Monsoon
!monsoon.png
Monsoon is mostly seen in equitorial areas.
!worldmap.png
An infographic of which country has which seasons
!seasons.png
questions?
thanks!
reach me out on:
@sayn.work sayn.work
@blog.sayn.work My Blog
To run the program on an example file go to the example/ folder and execute the program on the given source.pre file
present source.pre
and an output file of source.pre.pdf will be generated. Open it through any pdf viewer and the slides will be visible.
For the above snippet of code to work present has to be compiled and the binary has to be in $PATH. otherwise you can refer to it using its path.
../bin/present source.pre
present expects the presence of a font.ttf file which is to be used for the presentation. In the example folder a symlink to the poppins-regular is provided. feel free to change it to any font you like