Presentation Tools

So how do you make a useful presentation from a simple simple markup?

Update: I changed to Google Presentation -- it's simple and easy to use.

Solution

The first working solution I found was using pandoc to go from markdown to an s5 presentation:

Start by getting pandoc (I used apt-get install pandoc).

Create a slideshow: slides.txt:

% Eating Habits
% John Doe
% March 22, 2005

# In the morning

- Eat eggs
- Drink coffee

# In the evening

- Eat spaghetti
- Drink wine

Create the s5 presentation:

pandoc -w s5 -s slides.txt > some-slides.html

Point a browser to some-slides.html.

That is it.

Research

Beamer

The beamer class is a LaTeX class that allows you to create a beamer presentation. It can also be used to create slides. It behaves similarly to other packages like Prosper, but has the advantage that it works together directly with pdflatex, but also with dvips.

Markdown

Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to
another, and a command-line tool that uses this library. It can read
markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it
can write markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF,
DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup,
groff man pages, and S5 HTML slide shows.
What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Create some s5 slides with pandoc
$ pandoc -w s5 -s some-slides > some-slides.html

ReST

Easy Slide Shows With reST & S5

Supports themes and graphics and comes with some nice simple themes.

S5