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.“