marp VS mdx-deck

> Recently I've been using iAPresenter, which lets you build presentations using Markdown.

Save yourself the $90 for a one-time license and use Marp[1], for free, instead.

[1] https://marp.app/

--- theme: gaia _class: lead paginate: true backgroundColor: #fff backgroundImage: url('https://marp.app/assets/hero-background.svg') ---  # **Marp** Markdown Presentation Ecosystem https://marp.app/ --- # How to write slides Split pages by horizontal ruler (`---`). It's very simple! :satisfied: --- # Slide 1 foobar --- # Slide 2 foobar

I've done a number of text-based slide presentations with `marp` and I've been pleased with the results. Mostly it's just plain markdown slides but if you want to get into the weeds with HTML and have a 2-column slide or something you can do it. https://marp.app/

Just want to +1 this, and also add a twist. The Sphinx community also has a great extension called hieroglyph, which lets you use rST directives to build slide presentations which also double as single-page HTML notes documents.

https://hieroglyph.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting-started....

This meant I could first write a blog post on learning Clojure as a Pythonista[1]; then turn some code samples and tables and images into slides I could present on my laptop or desktop[2]; and then finally publish a public notes document that audience members could use to easily study or copy-paste code examples[3]. And this is generated HTML all the way down! And, of course, I could version control and render the .rst file powering the slides / notes / etc. in GitHub.

Note: the slides do not play well on mobile. You are meant to use keyboard arrows to advance and tap “t” to switch into tiled mode (aka slide sorter) and “c” to open a presenter console. The slides are powered by a fork of html5slides, which will look familiar if you’ve seen the JS/CSS slide template that Go core developers use in https://go.dev/talks (they generate those with “go present,” a different tool, though).

I have also used a similar-in-spirit tool called marp (https://marp.app) for generating technical slides from source, but the output and functionality was never quite as good as rST + Sphinx + hieroglyph. The big advantages to marp: Markdown is used as the source, some tooling allows for VSCode preview, and PDF export is fully supported alongside HTML slides.

I have a soft spot for Sphinx, not only because it was responsible for so much great documentation of Python open source libraries (including Python’s own standard library docs at python.org), but also because the first comprehensive technical docs I ever wrote for a successful commercial product were written in Sphinx. And the Sphinx-powered docs stayed thar way for a ridiculously long time before being moved to a CMS.

[1]: https://amontalenti.com/2014/11/02/clojonic

[2]: https://amontalenti.com/pub/clojonic/

[3]: https://amontalenti.com/pub/clojonic/notes/

We've been using a non-commercial alternative, marp, at work to great success and make slides where PowerPoint usually sucks: code blocks (we present on our data format frequently).

https://marp.app/

Marp: Markdown Presentation Ecosystem

for video, photo, and audio editing, I use open source software. even for slides, I recently started using an open source solution (https://marp.app for anyone curious!).

Upsi! Here is the link: https://github.com/marp-team/marp

I used to do this all the time and used a program called Marp https://marp.app/. I haven't done much recently so there may be a better option out now.

I've been a fan of mdx-deck for a while (https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck).

Yep, you can import JSX components and embed them with your run-of-the-mill Markdown prose. If you're documenting your JSX based component library, which is what Docz let you do, this makes all the sense in the world. MDX is also used to author slide decks in mdx-deck, which is very appealing if you're tired of clicking around in Keynote/PowerPoint/Google Sheets. Which many of us are. I'm not denying the appeal or usability of MDX for certain things for certain people.

Including the building of graphviz within pandoc lead to high build times, which is exactly the problem I wanted to avoid with the move away from mdx-deck