reveal-ck: a reveal.js construction kit

Overview

The goal of this project is let you quickly author reveal.js presentations.

It enables you to author reveal.js-aware-haml that can conveniently be transformed into slides.

The hope is that you will be able to leverage all of the power, beauty, and functionality that comes from reveal.js while focusing entirely on the actual content and ideas you are trying to get across.

This content will usually take the form of:

  • A file containing your slides (slides.haml)
  • A directory containing any images you'd like to reference relatively (images).

And, in return for this, you will be able to create slides that can be placed anywhere on the web (or kept locally). As with all reveal.js presentations, you can show these to other people on an iPhone, iPad, or present them in your browser.

Here's an example of the inputs you'd provide: https://github.com/jedcn/talk-learning-with-tools

Here's an example of the output you'd get: Coming Soon

For a full sampling of everything reveal.js can do, take a look at the live demo.

Getting Started

At present, we assume you've got a functional Ruby 1.9.x environment up and running.

If that's the case, try the following:

  • clone this project
  • run a bundle
  • run reveal-ck

At this point, the sample slides.haml that came with the project will be transformed into a set of slides. You can see the result by opening up slides/index.html in your browser.

If you've made it this far, you've got the basic basic functionality up and running.

Authoring Slides

Now that you are assured of basic functionality, start making changes and customizing slides.haml. Once you've made a change you'd like to see, re-run reveal-ck and then re-open (or refresh) slides/index.html

reveal.js has a great live demo, and if you take a look at the source in the demo, you can get up and running quickly with things that can be placed into your slides.haml.

Why not just clone reveal.js?

Or why not use http://www.rvl.io/ which offers a WYSIWYG experience?

You can! For sure.

The whole reveal.js offering is great.

If reveal-ck's approach is too contrived or doesn't warrant the setup time, skip it!

Then.. why would anyone use reveal-ck?

The thought behind this project to help you focus on what you want to say.

For me, focusing becomes easier and my thoughts clearer when I reduce the list of slides to a single file (slides.haml). It only contains the slide content I am presenting and there's minimal markup.

HAML isn't the most readable thing (say, compared to markdown), but it is decent and sharing or reviewing something like slides.haml is easier than reviewing the final presentation:

  • If you look at the presentation in a browser, you can't scan all of the slides at once. You need to visit them. If you're looking at slides.haml you can quickly scan through 30+ slides.

  • If you look at the html behind the presentation (say, view source), there's a bunch of stuff that makes the magic happen: styles, javascript, etc.

Finally, if you track your slides in a system like git, you can get meaningful diffs between versions of slides.haml. This is slightly easier than if you track the generated presentation.

In the end, the presentation framework, reveal.js, can make things pretty, but only you can make a presentation that is worthwhile.