Mike Zamansky is getting ready to give a presentation at a professional conference. As always, this means preparing a slide deck and Zamansky is faced with deciding how to do it.
In the past, he’s described reveal.js as his go to presentation software but he decided to look at the other options. In particular, he looked at ox-beamer and epresent as well as ox-reveal. His latest video discusses each of these and what he chose to use for his presentation.
All these solutions share the virtue that you can write your slides with Org mode and export them to ready-to-show slide decks. He starts by explaining why he doesn’t just use something like PowerPoint, Google Slides, or one of their free software siblings. Those systems, he says, force him to focus on how the slides are laid out and that gets in the way of writing coherent content. He much prefers to write in Org mode taking advantage of its editing capabilities and leave it to the exporter to make the final results look pretty.
His first attempt was to use beamer. Although he likes the way the slides look, he found beamer difficult to use. He doesn’t give very many presentations so it would be hard to remember the details of using it even if he made the initial investment in learning the system.
Epresent’s slides don’t look as nice as those from the other two systems but they have the virtue of displaying from within Emacs. It’s also very easy to navigate through the slides.
Finally, Zamansky considers reveal.js and its Emacs interface, ox-reveal. It combines a nice looking final product with a dead simple input structure. Basically, any Org file can be exported as a slide deck by the inclusion of a single statement telling ox-reveal where reveal.js is located. In the video, Zamansky just uses the epresent source file for the reveal.js example. All he needed to do was point it towards reveal.js. He also showed how it’s possible to serve the slide deck directly from GitHub. That could be handy if it’s not possible to use your own laptop for some reason or another.
The video is a bit longer than usual (20:12) so you may need to schedule some time. As always, it’s definitely worth your while to watch it.