How does it stack up against something like Reveal.js?
I have a couple of presentations that I did with Reveal. If Slidev can make formatting and deployment slightly easier, I would definitely consider switching over.
Slidev is amazing! It's an alternative to Google Slides/Keynote/Powerpoint, allowing you to code your slides as a website so you have more granular control.
The slides are written in markdown so it's very intuitive and easily maintainable:
```
# Slidev
Hello World
---
# Page 2
Directly use code blocks for highlighting
```ts
console.log('Hello, World!')
```
---
# Page 3
...
```
It's also built on top of Vite and Windi CSS so it's blazing fast!
For the first time, I can't wait to do a slideshow presentation!
----
PS. the author Anthony Fu is an incredibly talented & prolific engineer + designer. He maintains multiple large open source projects and yet somehow managed to deliver this.
More importantly, he's super kind and friendly, and strives to raise other engineers.
He's definitely on to big things!
I am both a programmer and someone who uses a fair amount of mathematics – I work in medical imaging, and it is not uncommon to have both psudeocode and "proper" equations in a talk.
I _still_ think that Keynote together with a colour-formatting syntax highlighter just can't be beat. Beamer on latex is excellent and listings is powerful – but it takes too long. Keynote's latex engine is 99.9% good enough and being able to arrange things graphically is just a killer feature. This looks like a very fancy, shiny project – but also at some level a bit of a time-sink. I'm really bad at spending effort on formatting instead of content, because I enjoy it, and it's a nice form of procrastination!
I didn't even realize Keynote had a latex engine. The equation support in Powerpoint results in nice formatting, but Powerpoint doesn't directly support latex format without third-party addins so it gets a bit tedious to use for more than a one-off. I generally end up using the equation editor in Word (that does support latex[1]) as a workaround, and just copying the output into Powerpoint.
My experience of the equation editor in Word on MacOS is that it definitely does not support any meaningful degree of compatibility with TeX. Command-alt-E in Keynote works properly and seems to have most of amsmath imported by default: you can \begin{pmatrix} or \begin{cases} easily.
One of my worst weekly experiences is receiving documents in Word, especially papers written by colleagues with maths in them. Writing Markov chains in the supplementary methods section for a recent paper genuinely drove me to distraction; each non-ascii character was a major break from the flow of the sentence and requires a move to the mouse.
I really dislike Word in general, actually: on Linux (my workstation) LibreOffice is integrated well and polished; on MacOS it isn't as much as there's some value in having the 'real deal' product as administrators in my university use it a lot. I don't understand why Word's behaviour is interpreted differently from that of the rest of MacOS: e.g. in Word, clicking to select a chunk of text from the middle of the word automatically selects the whole word the cursor was in, unlike the rest of MacOS. This makes selecting parts of a word almost impossible, and it's not possible (AFAIK) to turn this behaviour off.
I've seen many of these attempts by developers turned Product Manager (myself included). Ultimately the ease of use of powerpoint / google sheets cant be beat. There's a very long tail of UX niceties in these products and you can collaborate with non-developers on presentations.
Missing from markdown/web based slides is a way to auto resize text content to fit on a page, like powerpoint does. I didn't find a way to manage this correctly with reveal, remark or marp and from what I'm seeing, slidevjs won't do it either.
That's why I stick with Deckset (paid) [1] even though it has its share of bugs and limitations. I like it because I can write some basic semi-ugly slides in a fraction of the time it takes me in Powerpoint, as it's really just markdown, having to fiddle with JavaScript at all would make that moot, let alone for absolute basics like fit content to slide. Also, the themes it ships with are ok-ish.
It’s too bad it doesn’t export to PowerPoint. I’d like to be share with other coworkers who only know ppt. Nice that it exports to read only but that limits how slides can be reused.
Good question, have run into the same problem of sizing/positioning issues. Usually can just manually tweak so it will be okay on typical sizes for presentations, but not optimal.
I feel helpless after clicking around trying to find a live demo that I can play with. I have no idea how this tool works by just reading the documentations.
Having an example with code on the side can make it much much more clear what your tool does.
Obsidian md has a convenient plugin to render a markdown note as presentation. It's cool, because you can put some highlighted code or tex formulas on it.
I have a couple of presentations that I did with Reveal. If Slidev can make formatting and deployment slightly easier, I would definitely consider switching over.