Thursday 15 August 2013

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.

Written with StackEdit.

2 comments:

Peter Sefton said...

we're working on it :)

http://ptsefton.com/2013/08/07/html-slide-presentations-students-to-the-rescue.htm


Would the proposed format there help you?

Peter Sefton said...

we're working on it :)

http://ptsefton.com/2013/08/07/html-slide-presentations-students-to-the-rescue.htm


Would the proposed format there help you?