Laying out documents with Markdown and Pandoc

In Shape

Creating Presentations

Another interesting option for Markdown with Pandoc is creating sophisticated presentations by taking one of several approaches. For example, you can create an HTML-based slide set on the basis of a JavaScript web framework or a PDF set that uses the LaTeX beamer class [8]. In terms of web frameworks, Pandoc supports S5 [9], DZSlides [10], Slidy [11], Slideous [12], and reveal.js [13].

To create a new presentation, call Pandoc in the usual way. For a PDF slide set, the command is:

pandoc -t beamer slides.md -o slides.pdf

If you would rather create an HTML slide set based on one of the previously mentioned JavaScript web frameworks instead, the command is only marginally different:

pandoc -t revealjs slides.md -o slides-reveal.html

In the last example, make sure the JavaScript web framework is in the same directory as the Markdown file. Alternatively, you can specify a different path to the framework with the -V revealjs-url option.

Of course, you can use a variety of other options, such as integrating different themes. The documentation for the respective frameworks contains all the necessary information.

Conclusions

To create appealing text documentation, you don't necessarily have to resort to classics such as Word or LibreOffice. A combination of Markdown and Pandoc lets you convert text into a number of different formats. PDF slide sets can also be created, as long as you have a LaTeX distribution installed on your system along with the beamer class. For HTML presentations, you then can use various JavaScript web frameworks to start a slideshow in any browser.

Infos

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
TeX text typesetting system: https://www.tug.org
LaTeX macros: https://www.latex-project.org
Markdown markup language: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
Markdown Guide: https://www.markdownguide.org
Pandoc: https://pandoc.org
MikTeX: https://miktex.org/download
LaTex beamer class: https://github.com/josephwright/beamer/
S5: https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
DZSlides: http://paulrouget.com/dzslides/
Slidy: https://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2/#(1)
Slideous: https://goessner.net/articles/slideous/
reveal.js: https://revealjs.com

The Author

Thorsten Scherf is the global Product Lead for Identity Management and Platform Security in Red Hat's Product Experience group. He is a regular speaker at various international conferences and writes a lot about open source software.

« Previous 1 2