SlideDeX is an editor for LaTeX presentations. Using Beamer, Prosper, or even the slides class, it's possible to make beautiful slides for your presentation. As the presentation grows, working with it becomes more difficult. Compilation takes longer as the number of slides increases, slowing the tweak-and-test cycle. It can become harder to find the source corresponding to a specific slide.

SlideDeX attempts to solve these problems by splitting the presentation into its individual slides. Each can be edited and compiled individually, and the source of a given slide is readily available. To do this, SlideDeX relies on the fact that, unlike many types of LaTeX documents, presentations have pages which are largely independent of each other. Thus, the original LaTeX file may be split into a header, a footer, and a set of individual slides. Each slide may be assembled into a document with the header and footer and then compiled quickly. Only when all slides are ready does the entire presentation need to be compiled together.

SlideDeX is currently very much pre-alpha software — use at your own risk! The author finds it usable, but there are many missing features. Although it hasn't caused any data loss for me, I can't promise that you'll be so lucky. Back up your presentations before using SlideDeX!

SlideDeX is written in Python 2. It should work with any 2.6 or 2.7 version, though that has not been carefully tested. SlideDeX uses pyGTK and Glade. Linux systems probably have these installed; Mac and Windows people may be in for an adventure. (If you get it working, please let us know how!)

The Poppler library and its Python bindings are used for displaying the slides. The former is probably installed on your Linux system; the latter may not be. In Debian-based systems, install the python-poppler package. Again, good luck to you Mac and Windows users.

Of course, you also need a working TeX installation somewhere on your path.

The best way to get SlideDeX is by cloning the git repository:

git clone git://github.com/rschroll/slidedex.git

Alternatively, you can download and unpack the tarball.

Currently, SlideDeX has no installation procedure. Instead, run the script from wherever you downloaded it:

/path/to/install/slidedex/bin/slidedex <filename>

Unfortunately, SlideDeX does not currently import existing presentations. You must either create them from an empty presentation or edit an existing presentation to be in the form that SlideDeX expects. Specifically, you need to add a separator :

%%SLIDEEDIT%%

after the header, before the footer, and in between all slides.

Before compiling the presentation, in whole or in part, it must have a filename chosen. SlideDeX will prompt you for the name at an appropriate place. If you do not provide a name, SlideDeX will complain about you in a passive-aggressive manner. Whether this is a bug or a feature has not been decided.

The compilation process is currently hardcoded in the _do_latex method of LatexDocument to be :

latex -halt-on-error <basename>
dvips <basename>
ps2pdf <basename>.ps

If you want to change that, change the first argument of self.executor.add() in that method. Hopefully this will become more configurable soon.

SlideDeX is being developed on GitHub. Check out that site for updated versions. Please report bugs and feature requests to the Github bug tracker.

SlideDeX has been written (thus far) by Robert Schroll (rschroll@gmail.com). Feel free to get in touch with questions and comments.