HTML Slides and multimode documents

Well, I'm still impressed with HTML slide generation abilities of Markdown and Pandoc, the more so as it allows one to use a common base format document which could be turned into both a handout and a presentation.

While this is a simple concept it's guite powerful as we are essentially creating a multi modal document.

The only problem is that the output documents are scrappy.

The text document is easy to fix - an automated export to libre office to have a template applied plus a bit of eyeballing to fix up any problems and then a pdf export.

And of course if you have an odt document you can readily convert and share it via googledocs.

Slidy is a little different. While accepatable for a presentation between consenting adults the appearance is a little raw. Unlike Google's presentation tool it's not particularly simple to apply a template (although it is possible but this requires fiddling with css). Equally it's not particularly easy to export the slidy files to something else and apply the template as a part of the workflow.

The aim at the end of it is to have a document that can be converted to html and displayed on a web page, or like this document ported to a blog, while at the same time provide an easy takeaway option to either view it as a slideshow or download it is a set of notes, as an aid to students being able to access it in a way that most aids revision - we already know that students make substantial use of lecture recordings as revision aids.

I can glimpse the future, but I'm not quite there yet.

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