The problem
Making presentations is no fun!
Welcome to the presenter console!
GUI tools are inflexible
- It's hard to reorganize or import text
- Sluggy and memory hungry
- You get caught up in design early in the process.
Here you have a view of the current slide, a preview of the next slide and your notes.
Use txt2tags!
- You can use your favorite text-editor!
- Many tools available: export to beamer, pdf, html
- Convenient (and powerful!)
You also have a clock and a timer, so you know how much time you have left.
But then there was Prezi
Sliding from left to right is no longer enough.
You need to be able to...
If you click on the timer it restarts from zero. This is handy when you are rehearsing the presentation and need to make sure it fits in the time allocated.
...pan...
If you have more notes than fits in the console, you can scroll down, but more handily, you can scroll the text up by pressing space bar.
...rotate...
If there isn't more text to scroll up, space bar will go to the next slide. Therefore you, as a presenter, just press space everytime you run out of things to say!
...and zoom!
Zooming is cool. But one day it will grow old as well. What will we do then to make presentations interesting?
But Prezi is a GUI
So we are back to square one.
(And it is closed source to boot)
It's probably back to making bad jokes again.
What about impress.js?
It's open source!
Supports pan, tilt and zoom!
In three dimensions!
But...
Wow! 3D! You didn't see that one coming, did you?
It's HTML...
Not a friendly format to edit
...and manual positioning
So inserting one slide means
repositioning all the following slides!
The endless repositioning of slides is what prompted me to write Hovercraft! in the first place.
Is there no solution?
Of course there is!
What would be the point of this slide show if I didn't have a solution? Duh!
Introducing Hovercraft!
TADA!
txt2tags
plus
impress.js
plus
impressConsole.js
plus
positioning!
Position slides
- Automatically!
- Absolutely!
- Relative to the previous slide!
- Along an SVG path!
That SVG path support was a lot of work. And all I used it for was to position the slides in circles.
Presenter console!
- A view of the current slide
- A view of the next slide
- Your notes
- A clock
- A timer
You found the presenter console already!
Hovercraft!
The merge of convenience and cool!
A slogan: The ad-mans best friend!
and now...
Hovercraft-t2t!
Edit your presentation with the txt2tags syntax!
On Github:
https://github.com/farvardin/hovercraft-t2t
Fork and contribute!
Note: We didn't code hovercraft.
Hovercraft-t2t is only a frontend to produce a reStructuredText document from a txt2tags document, and it will be parsed further with the hovercraft tool.
The original hovercraft is located at https://github.com/regebro/hovercraft
How to use it
- Install hovercraft with this command:
pip install hovercraft
If it fails, try: sudo pip install --upgrade setuptools pip-3.2 install --upgrade hovercraft
- Study the t2t source at:
https://github.com/farvardin/hovercraft-t2t/blob/master/hovercraft-t2t.t2t