Introduction

I created a simple system for making presentations with slides in them. The gist of it is: different Markdown paragraphs are put into a rectangle, each rectangle representing a slide, with some added options for layout and format.

ftags

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An ftag (“format tag”) is what I call a short string of characters, that starts with two ampersands (&&). Each ftag is a “marker” that gets replaced by some other text (usually HTML tags).

An easy example is the image of the Great Britain flag (part of Flags.awk, not the presentation system!): typing out &&GB (in lowecase), gets replaced by the actual image - .

Why?

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• Programs like Microsoft PowerPoint and LibreOffice Impress have very poor compatibility, between programs, versions, languages and even operating systems. A web-based solution is significantly more consistent and flexible.

• Ideally, the system would be made well enough that creating a presentation would be significantly faster than with one of those.

• Making my own system means I can tailor it to my needs and preferences. Looking around other HTML-based presentation tools:

  • reveal.js is way too heavy and fancy for my needs (animations are nice, but I’m fine going without them)
  • DZSlides and S5 are really nice, however both are HTML-centric, and I want my slides to be written in Markdown. Creating ftags that are transformed to DZSlide HTML is possible, but at that point I should just make my own system.
  • and pretty much everything else falls into either category

Formatting

Every (presentation-specific) ftag is listed and explained in Presentation.awk. To summarize, each slide is wrapped in &&slide and &&/slide (or &&clide and &&/clide), you can change font size for specific portions, you can add basic (without formatting) tables for fancy layout, you can align text and elements and you can add line breaks.

And they can work together in most different combination.

Though, remember that everything gets translated to HTML, so don’t do (even if it works)

&&slide &&font20 &&/slide &&/font

Enough talking, here are examples!

Font-size 30px (default)

But you may realize that text floated to the right will make other text wrap around it! Maybe this should be changed?