Overhead

really simple slides with Markdown

by Peter Eisentraut

Before we start

• use cursor keys or mouse to navigate
• press f for full screen

But why?

Other presentation tools

• are too complicated for occasional speakers
• are bloated
• are ugly
• are hard to customize
• don’t render my content correctly
• keep breaking

I like writing, but producing slides is giving me angst. Before every conference, I try a new tool, without much success.

Some things I have tried

• LaTeX Beamer: complicated syntax, very fragile, huge software stack, not very agile, hard to customize, hard to include images, videos

This is still a respectable tool, but we can do better.

Some things I have tried

• DocBook Slides: verbose syntax, hard to customize, dated look

I like the idea of standardized markup, but the implementation is dated and hard to work with.

Some things I have tried

• OpenOffice: WYSIWYG is frustrating, consistent formatting is cumbersome

Gets the job done, but not what I’m aiming for.

Some things I have tried

• Showoff: huge Ruby stack keeps breaking, nonstandard Markdown syntax, hard to fix things when the formatting doesn't work

This was the right idea, but it kept breaking.

Some things I have tried

• reveal.js: huge codebase, kept truncating my code samples, a lot of work to customize

Again, right idea, but it shouldn’t be that complicated.

I don’t ask for much

• tools that don’t break
• version-controllable
• easy to customize
• but no customization necessary
• simple syntax
• standardized formats

No dependencies

• I don’t want to live in fear of having to debug a Ruby or NPM stack the night before a presentation.
• I’d like my presentation to still work in two, three, or six years.

Standardized formats

• Markdown and/or HTML
• let the browser handle the rest:
  • images
  • videos
  • math markup?
  • your custom JavaScript magic?

It’s not that hard!

• standard Markdown/CommonMark processor, plus
• <100 lines of plain CSS, plus
• <120 lines of plain JavaScript, plus
• browser

= complete presentation tool

Example

source of this presentation

Little code, lots of features

• keyboard, mouse, and touch navigation
• supports some presenter remotes (if they produce key events)
• easy full screen mode
• direct links to slides (URL fragments)
• printing/PDF support
• source code highlighting

Source code highlighting

example with highlight.js:

# a comment
if i > 0
  puts "positive"
end

Not supported/not planned

• speaker notes
• speaker clock
• incremental revealing
• slide transitions

I have never seen Al Gore or Steve Jobs use speaker notes. Just sayin’.

Final remark

• Don’t write presentation slides like I did here.
• This is a “presentation” for reading on the web, not for presenting.

Resources

• http://overhead.xyz/
• https://github.com/petere/overhead

Contact

• peter@eisentraut.org
• https://peter.eisentraut.org/
• @petereisentraut@mastodon.social

Good bye

Postscript: Table test

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