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Discussion on: What tools do you use to prepare talks and presentations.

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tamouse profile image
Tamara Temple • Edited

I'm going to assume you mean the tools used to prepare slide decks, and not the up-front work of researching, gathering, and organizing the content of the talk?

I began public speaking back in the days before Powerpoint existed, and saw the rise of the traveling briefcase with hundreds of foils / slides / transparencies. :)

I will say, back in those times, I made my presentations by hand on flip-charts with marker pens. :)

But here we are, so far removed from those days, with ubiquitous and indispensable computers.

I have a penchant for creating slide decks that are easily created and maintained using text editors and using software version management.

I'm particularly fond of using ruby, and so I turn to tools like jekyll, to put together a deck of slides, slide components, and assets. "What?" you ask, "Jekyll is for blogs!" -- well, that is it's "on label" use, but it's actually about assembling pieces of content into a whole something -- and that something can be anything.

I wrote a starter kit, which I admit to letting fall into disarray by not keeping it up to date, that lets me put together a talk writing individual slides as markdown files, and assemble them into a reveal.js - driven slide deck. It also works to put them together, along with notes and annotations, into a companion web page / site, suitable for printing.

Nowadays, I'm as apt to write a presentation using org-mode in emacs to produce a beamer slide deck.

And the last talk I gave I did in keynote.

I'm up for finding a new way to do this that doesn't require too much effort, is easy to share, easy to update, and fits my thought- and work-flow. It'll probably end up being something using Yeoman and Gatsby :)

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antonrich profile image
Anton

You assumption is correct.

Wow, you go way back with your experience. You are old school kick ass!
That's wonderful.

What is a penchant?

Knowing that Jekyll is for blogs, how did you turn into a tool for presentation? Did you read some learning material about this or you come up with everything on your own?

WWOOOOWWW, org mode. I recently started with emacs. I'm not going full in on it at the moment. I practice writing stuff in it every day though and learn small bits here and there. Haven't touch org mode yet. It's so exciting to know that I can do presentations with org mode.

If you will share your experience with emacs and presentations in general and define your further goals that'd be a terrific read.

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tamouse profile image
Tamara Temple

A penchant is a posh word for "something I like using or doing".

With Jekyll, I just saw an opportunity to turn a screwdriver into a can opener... no, I mean I was working on a reveal presentation for a class I was teaching that someone else had put together and thought "This is so tedious! How can I make this not so awfully painful?". I'd been playing around with Jekyll for some time, and thought about the idea that it's an assembler of sorts; the output of what's assembled is up to the developer. It was recently after Jekyll came out with their Collections concept and seemed ripe for use in some unconventional way.