Presentation tools

1. blog

I keep forgetting how to make presentations. I had a list of tools in a wiki from a previous job, but that's now private and I don't see why I shouldn't share this (even if for myself!).

So here it is. What's your favorite presentation tool?

Tips

• if you have some text to present, outline keywords so that you can present your subject without reading every word
• ideally, don't read from your slides - they are there to help people follow, not for people to read
• even better: make your slides pretty with only a few words, or don't make slides at all

Further advice:

• 7 tips by Jeffrey Veen
• 10 tips by Neil Patel
• The Art of Presenting by Matt Westgate (video)
• Presenting You by Emma Jane Hogbin (video)
• Create better conference slides and presentations by Stéphanie Walter

I'm currently using Pandoc with PDF input (with a trip through LaTeX) for most slides, because PDFs are more reliable and portable than web pages. I've also used Libreoffice, Pinpoint, and S5 (through RST) in the past. I miss Pinpoint, too bad that it died.

Some of my presentations are available in my GitLab.com account:

• Presentations while I worked at Koumbit
• Short presentation about PRISM
• Security training
• Ethics in computing, based on this blog post
• Presentation about the Maple Spring, at OHM2013
• First presentation at Tor
• Tor presentations

See also my list of talks and presentations which I can't seem to keep up to date.

Tools

Beamer (LaTeX)

• LaTeX class
• Do not use directly unless you are a LaTeX expert or masochist, see Pandoc below
• see also powerdot
• Home page

Darkslide

• HTML, Javascript
• presenter notes, table of contents, Markdown, RST, Textile, themes, code samples, auto-reload
• Home page, demo

Hovercraft

• reStructuredText, impress.js, written in Python
• presenter notes, HTML output, needs Javascript
• Source code, demo

Impress.js

• Javascript
• Zooms in and out, 3D support
• Source code, demo
• Hekyll uses Jekyll as a backend

Impressive

• simply displays PDFs or images
• page transitions, overview screen, highlighting
• Home page

Libreoffice Impress

• Powerpoint clone
• Makes my life miserable
• PDF export, presenter notes, outline view, etc
• Home page, screenshots

Magicpoint

• ancestor of everyone else (1997!)
• text input format, image support, talk timer, slide guides, HTML/Postscript export, draw on slides, X11 output
• no release since 2008
• Home page

mdp and lookatme (commandline)

• Commandline-only, markdown
• Home page
• lookatme is similar

Pampi

• Markdown, pandoc, impress
• Home page

Pandoc

• Allows converting from basically whatever into slides, including Beamer, DZSlides, reveal.js, slideous, slidy, Powerpoint
• PDF, HTML, Powerpoint export, presentation notes, full screen background images
• nice plain text or markdown input format
• Home page, documentation

PDF Presenter

• PDF presentation tool, shows presentation notes
• basically "Keynote for Linux"
• Home page, pdf-presenter-console in Debian

Another viewer that might be relevant here is pympress which supports annotations (in a separate screen), caching, timing, and embedded videos. dspdfviewer is another such viewer.

Others just use their IDE directly.

Pinpoint

• Native GNOME app
• Full screen slides, PDF export, live change, presenter notes, pango markup, video, image backgrounds
• Home page
• Abandoned since at least 2019

Remark

• In-browser, HTML/Markdown/Javascript based
• Home page

Reveal.js

• HTML, Javascript
• PDF export, Markdown, LaTeX support, syntax-highlighting, nested slides, speaker notes
• Source code, demo

S5

• HTML, CSS
• incremental, bookmarks, keyboard controls
• can be transformed from ReStructuredText (RST) with rst2s5 with python-docutils
• Home page, demo

sent

• X11 only
• plain text, black on white, image support, and that's it
• from the suckless.org elitists
• Home page

Sozi

• Entire presentation is one poster, zooming and jumping around
• SVG + Javascript
• Home page, demo

Other options

Another option I have seriously considered is just generate a series of images with good resolution, hopefully matching the resolution (or at least aspect ratio) of the output device. Then you flip through a series of images one by one. In that case, any of those image viewers (not an exhaustive list) would work:

• Geeqie
• GNOME's eog
• pho
• feh
• fim
• sxiv

And to make diagrams, see this maybe exhaustive list.

Update: it turns out I already wrote a somewhat similar thing when I did a recent presentation. If you're into rants, you might enjoy the README file accompanying the Kubecon rant presentation. TL;DR: "makes me want to scream" and "yet another unsolved problem space, sigh" (referring to "display images full-screen" specifically).

See also this X11 list and this Wayland list.

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