Modified: Thibaut Lamadon -- Added MathJax support John McDonnell -- Various cleanup

Version: 0.1 | 2011/09/21

This is a simple modification of Ulf Bögeholz version. I just added support for math with MathJax. I am leaving most of the author's comment.

After I saw deck.js recently, I immediatelly liked the look and feel of it. What I did not like was to generate HTML slides by hand. I surfed around a bit and quickly found out that there was a nice markdown library for python. Playing around (and not sleeping instead) quickly showed results. Voila.

• markdown
• jinja2
• elementtree

Install by using Pip: pip install markdown jinja2 elementtree

• Write a markdown file with your presentation in it
• Compile the markdown file to a deck.js HTML file
• Enjoy the slides

$ git clone https://github.com/ulf/markdown2deckjs.git
$ cd markdown2deckjs
$ ./m2d README.md templates/plain.html "Readme" > readme.html
# Look at the readme.html file in your browser. Done

Every time the markdown contains a H1 or H2 (#, ##), a new slide will be created in your presentation. Basically just write your text and mix in a heading if you need a new slide.

# Title Slide

  ## First Content Slide
  This is nice

  ## Second Content Slide
  This too

## Slide with some math

  - Here it is $\alpha$
  - ~ And more $\int x dx$

 ~ $$ g(z) = \int f(a-z) u(a) da $$    

will result in a four-slide presentation with rendered math. Try it:

$ m2d example1.md templates/plain.html "My Test" > example1.html

One problem with deck.js is that it is not easily sharable offline. So I added an option to the program which allows for creation of simple HTML files for easy distribution. No slide effects will be applied in the HTML code, as well other control elements (like tilde, see below) will be stripped.

$ m2d example.md templates/download.html "My Test" -p > downloadable.html

The python markdown module offers a broad scope for writing extensions. I found a possibility to hook in an extension after the HTML element tree has already been generated from the markdown file. All I do is traverse the tree and make some minor adjustments in the element configuration. The altered HTML is then pasted into a plain deck.js template to generate the presentation.

I added a little feature to make slides more interactive. If your text elements end with a tilde, the char is stripped and the element is instead given the slide class, which has the effect that the element will not be shown initially. Instead, you need to advance the slide to show the element. This seemed to be te easiest way to construct incremental slides.

Feel free! Just fork or get in touch if you like, there might be a lot of ways to make this better.