Powerpoint is dead (HTML5 presentations with landslide)

Powerpoint is dead. Well, not yet, but for simple presentations you can use the following tool perfectly. This entry is based on Francisco Souza’s excellent post entitled “Creating HTML 5 slide presentations using landslide“. Here I make a short summary.

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Landslide is a Python tool for converting marked-up texts to HTML5 slide presentations. The input text can be written in Markdown, reStructuredText, or Textile. A sample slideshow presenting landslide itself is here.

Sample input: 2.md (taken from the landslide project)
Sample output: presentation.html

Installation

sudo pip install landslide

Usage

landslide text.md

If you want to share it on the Internet: “landslide -cr text.md“.

Help: “landslide --help“.

To learn about the customization of the theme, refer to Francisco’s post.

Convert to PDF

landslide file.md -d out.pdf

For this you need Prince XML, which is free for non-commercial use. Unfortunately the output is black and white with additional blank pages for notes. If you know how to have colored PDFs without the extra pages, let me know.

It’d be interesting to replace Prince XML with wkhtmltopdf. I made some tests but the output was not nice. I think it could be tweaked though.

Related stuff

Pandoc is a universal document converter.

“If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Need to generate a man page from a markdown file? No problem. LaTeX to Docbook? Sure. HTML to MediaWiki? Yes, that too. Pandoc can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, textile, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, textile, groff man pages, Emacs org-mode, EPUB ebooks, and S5 and Slidy HTML slide shows. PDF output (via LaTeX) is also supported with the included markdown2pdf wrapper script.“

Free HTML5 templates

“Free HTML5 Templates are just what they sound like: free web templates using valid HTML5 code. Some of the templates may also include CSS3 code as well, but those will be clearly tagged, and because CSS3 is still evolving and is highly dependent upon browser vendor implementations, the CSS may not always validate.

The goal, of course, is to help you use the newest, most modern template code available. As the HTML 5 standard evolves, we’ll evolve with it.

We license our free templates under the Creative Commons Attribution (by) 3.0, which put simply, means you can distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon our work, even commercially, as long as you credit us for the original creation.” (source)

The template portfolio is here.

HTML5 test

To test how your browser supports HTML5, visit http://html5test.com/.

Update (20110417)
If you are not too excited about HTML5, then look at this presentation: http://slides.html5rocks.com/. It works best with Google Chrome. Hmm, not bad :) Check out http://www.html5rocks.com/ too if you want to learn more about HTML5.