remark VS impress.js

Eh there are loads of these based on Markdown that are much better. I think revealjs is the most popular, but I like remarkjs:

https://github.com/gnab/remark

There's a list of them here:

Thanks for your comment, u/legitEngin. Indeed, I do see a slew of Markdown-to-presentation plugins (this work was inspired by one at https://github.com/gnab/remark), and I hope I can inspire more instructors to consider using plain text to organize their work instead of lugging around heavy PPTs.

remarkjs github; easy guide; simple demo with default settings

One of my proudest open source contributions is also to excalidraw. It's a small tweak. Since about a year ago, chrome will re-save the .png to disk when you ctrl+s or cmd+s (with the embedded scene, and without prompting for a location). It gives you a really nice workflow for documentation and remark-style slides for presentations.

just some text, but easy to tweak/adopt/write? -> https://remarkjs.com

It's a good idea, which is why it's already been done. That's not to say you shouldn't finish it! You might improve on the idea, or it might just be a good learning experience.

I've given presentations in ReMark before, which is basically "markdown -> web slideshow" using a JS blob. Worked alright for simple presentations without complicated formatting needs, and loads all the images on the fly, so it implicitly picks up any re-generated figures. It also made it very easily to collaborate on presentations via GitHub, since the whole "presentation" was a short text file.

I remember a few years ago some more dynamic presentation modes making a bit of a splash. I used one of them[1] to good reception in at least one talk, but ultimately it felt more like really slick slide-to-slide transitions than a fundamentally different paradigm.

[1] https://impress.js.org/

What do you mean by interactive? If you're talking slideshows, then stuff like reveal.js, impress.js, deck.js, or shower would do the trick.

I've looked at impress.js and reveal.js. Impress feels a little dated to me (very Prezzi-like) and not very accessible if I wanted to hand out the url.

For other programatic methods, there are plenty of non-LaTeX tools, reveal.js and impress.js for starters, but the learning curve for someone not already familiar with web design and javascript is too high IMO just to get prettier transitions and embedded video.