Overview

There are three aspects to a slideshow presentation:

• the content
• the design
• the delivery

This post focuses on the content and design. Imagine yourself, looking to quickly prepare a slideshow, and opening up google slides or powerpoint. What you really bring to the table is the content, but along the way you have to deal with manually composing slides; moving the textbox a little to the right, changing the font, resizing images.

Would it be possible to write a program that lets you forget about design, focus on the content, and then have a polished presentation generated for you? You would need a way to communicate the content with the program, an outliner tool. hmm

It turns out that there is a great package that accomplishes exactly this! See org-reveal, a package that uses reveal.js to turn plain text org files into html slideshow presentations. You can include all the typical presentation things: images, code, tables, etc. See an example presentation here.

Installation

In spacemacs org-reveal is easy to setup. You enable it using org variables as follows and set the org-re-reveal-root to where you installed reveal.js on your computer:

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(org :variables
     org-enable-reveal-js-support t
   )

(setq org-re-reveal-root "file:///home/gautierk/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/reveal.js/")

Usage

To use org-reveal, outline your presentation in an org file. Use org metadata to set things like the title and author. When you’re ready to export, run org-export-dispatch (, e e on spacemacs) and then type v b to export using reveal. You did it! For more options see the org-reveal README. Here is an example presentation I made.