/snippetize

Rube (not Ruby!) Goldberg contraption to update code snippets inside presentations

Primary LanguagePython

Welcome

Snippetize helps you keep the code snippets on your presentation slides up to date. It's designed to work with Keynote '09, but could be adapted to any presentation software capable of saving XML (including OpenOffice and PowerPoint).

Install

Do these steps once on your machine:

  1. Install the pygments and py-dom-xpath libraries (sudo where appropriate):

    easy_install pygments

easy_install py-dom-xpath
  2. Put the Snippetize code from http://github.com/undees/snippetize in a directory on your hard drive somewhere.

Prepare

Do these steps once for each new presentation.

  1. Prepare the syntax-highlighting sample, which you'll use later to train Keynote. There are a couple of ways to do this, depending on which editor you use:
  • With TextMate:
    1. Open styles.rb in TextMate.
    2. Run the "Create HTML From Document" command from the TextMate bundle. A window should pop up.
    3. Highlight and copy all the code from the HTML preview window. You'll paste it into Keynote later.
  • Without TextMate:

    1. Run the following commands:

      pygmentize -f html -O full,style=fruity style.rb > style.html

open style.html
    2. Hightlight and copy all the code from your browser window. You'll paste it into Keynote later.
  1. Train Keynote to recognize your syntax colors.
  1. Create an empty slide in your presentation.
  2. Paste the code you copied previously into it.
  3. Get the position and font size looking how you want them.
  4. Bring up the Inspector window for the text box containing your code.
  5. Make the entire box a hyperlink to http://localhost/style. (You don't need to make a web page available at this address; this is just a special URL to help Snippetize find this slide.)
  6. From the Slide menu, choose "Skip Slide" to make this slide hidden.
  1. Generate a config file for Snippetize.
  1. Run configurize.py slides.key > config.py.
  2. Tweak the base and snippets settings inside config.py based on the instructions in the file.

Write

Do these steps once for each slide that's going to contain code.

  1. Create a new, blank slide.
  2. Create a new text box on that slide.
  3. Give the text box an appropriate position and font size for code.
  4. Bring up the Inspector window for the text box.
  5. Decide which file and (optionally) part of the file this slide will contain. For example, you may want to show a snippet named "foo" in a file called example.py.
  6. Make the entire box a hyperlink to your file and part, in the following style: http://localhost/example.py?foo. (You don't need to make a web page available at this address; this is just a special URL to help Snippetize find this slide.)

Update

Do this step each time you want to update your slides with fresh code:

snippetize.py slides.key slides_out.key config.py

If you just want to update one snippet, you can name that snippet as a final parameter:

snippetize.py slides.key slides_out.key config.py example.py\?foo

Consider

This is quite a bit of up-front work; the payoff is less maintenance work as you update your code. The sweet spot for this is a presentation that has both many code and non-code slides. If your talk is nearly all code and shell sessions, something like http://github.com/schacon/showoff may be a better fit.