Presentation tools

3.1 RMarkdown to PowerPoint

RMarkdown will export to PowerPoint (thanks pandoc).

The main trick is the speaker notes, which look like this:

::: notes
This is a speaker note.
:::

This is the same as reveal.js but NOT the same as the speaker notes for remark.js/xaringan so switching between these is not seamless.

NB Mathematical markup is supported but not LaTeX macros of any kind.

Still, it is not too nasty.

3.2 RMarkdown HTML

RMarkdown renders to various HTML slides systems. A whole lot of backends are supported. A de facto standard is Reveal, which is the one I usually use.

It can be clunky (image and text side-by-side is painful), but it does the job.

Remark.js achieves support via xaringan, which is Yihui Xe’s favourite system. It has such luxuries as presenter notes and interactive style generator, although it has a slightly different syntax and parser so some stuff will format differently, or brokenly if you switch between reveal and remark.

My R IDE is VS Code rather than the more typical RStudio, so I use this script to launch the slide viewer for me:

#!/usr/bin/env Rscript
library(servr)
port=4000
cmdArgs = commandArgs(trailingOnly = TRUE)
if (length(cmdArgs>0)){
    port = strtoi(cmdArgs[1])
}
servr::httw(port=port)
browseURL(paste("http://127.0.0.1:", port, sep="")

I save it in serve.R and execute it as

serve.R 4000

The smart-ish web server will helpfully update the browser when I update the slides.

6.1 Scribus

Scribus is a good open source desktop publisher system (think InDesign, but free, but also occasionally broken.) I discovered it while writing posters, but it has many features to recommend it for other PDFs also, including an adequate in-built LaTeX math renderer and good support for vector graphics, and it will even render arbitrary graphs from weird command-line software automagically via render frames.

7.1 Reveal.js

reveal.js is the poster child for HTML slides. The online editor makes it easier to collaborate with my non-HTML-nerd colleagues.

• Git source code
• It has a GUI theme editor.
• There is a commercial spinoff GUI slide editor slides.com.
• jupyter notebooks support reveal.js.
• Note that Rmarkdown supports reveal.js.

Creating themes seems to require you to fork reveal’s GitHub repo for full generality, which feels a bit weird. Although in principle one can still just inject those CSS stylesheets as made famous by the web, right? Either way, in practice theming can be a rabbit hole of flex-box and responsive media queries.

If a PDF export is needed, an adequate method is as follows:

Presentations can be exported to PDF via a special print stylesheet.

Note: This feature has only been confirmed to work in Google Chrome and Chromium.

Instructions

1. Open your presentation with print-pdf included in the query string, for example: http://localhost:8000/?print-pdf. You can test this at revealjs.com/demo?print-pdf.
2. Open the in-browser print dialog (CTRL/CMD+P).
3. Change the Destination setting to Save as PDF.
4. Change the Layout to Landscape.
5. Change the Margins to None.
6. Enable the Background graphics option.
7. Click Save

Alternatively, generic PDF exporter decktape also works.

See also sundry workflow notes.

Speaker notes require the following header configuration

  revealjs::revealjs_presentation:
    self_contained: false
    reveal_plugins: [
      "notes"]

Thereafter, either of these seem to work as notes:

<aside class="notes">
lies! this is all lies
</aside>

::: notes
Don’t worry this lecture is nearly over.
:::

For the speaker notes to work a local webserver is required — I use serve.R above.

7.2 Remark.js

remark.js is mostly similar to Reveal.js, is a more minimalist maybe and a little tidier. For me mostly relevant as the backend for xaringan for R HTML slides. It was not immediately obvious what dialects of markdown are supported by remark.js. (not pandoc!) Specifically it supports gfm and commonmark. The documentation for the former is superior.

7.3 Shower

Shower Presentation Engine IS a do-over for HTML slides.

It has more modern mathematics support and two-column mode. On the downside, it does not support speaker notes (unless you count mouseover footers.) It is also a backend to RMarkdown, via rmdshower.

• Shower Presentations with R Markdown
• MangoTheCat/rmdshower: R Markdown template for shower

7.4 Other HTML slide systems

• The classic is Eric Meyer’s S5, although it’s showing its age. No longer recommended.
• Also foundational and elegant, but no longer maintained, deck.js …
• marp is an integrated markdown presentation writer
• MarkDeck - presentations as code promises good offline support
• impress.js does prezi-style fancy slide animations. Documentation is basic
• DZslides is not my favourite but worth mentioning because it’s used as a knitr example, although in fact one could better use S5 or, more modern still, reveal.js.
• an interactive tutorial on making interactive tutorials using d3.js (which would also work fine with reveal.js, presumably.)
• wunderpresentation turns other things into presentations. For the moment, notably, trello.

9.1 RISE

In addition to the basic reveal.js integration, there is even a convenient (although slightly restricted) version of reveal available to display and interact with jupyter notebooks as slideshows via RISE.

Customisation of style etc for RISE:

1. use nbextensions_configurator; this tool offers an interactive way to enable, disable and tweak all notebook extensions — see screenshot below;
2. define settings in JSON files, typically by using Python scripts;
3. you can also embed settings in a specific notebook’s metadata;
4. and you can also provide your own CSS file(s), that can supersede styling of the various DOM pieces.

PDF export is clunky but works.

I have not used this for a while, but last time I found it annoying because Jupyter is already clunky. I do not need any additional clunk.