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Workshop Slides

I’ve hosted workshops for the software engineering club at my university using org mode with RevealJs.

Workshops

Creating a power point presentation felt boring and generic. I wanted to be extra.

In search of alternatives, I required the following features:

  • Code blocks
  • Math typesetting

Beamer is a possibility but I’d rather org than $\LaTeX$

Since the end product is a static site, I can host it with GitHub pages so the audience can go look through the slides at their own pace.

But I have to be honest, this process takes up more time than using PowerPoint but I need an excuse to visit my good old friend Emacs.

While I was configuring my Doom Emacs configuration, I ran into the +present flag for org with the following description:

A configuration for using org-mode for slide-show presentations or exporting org files to reveal.js slideshows

I was already aware of the power of Emacs, but I was intrigued as to how it’s able to create a presentation

If you don’t use Doom Emacs, you’ll have to install org-reveal

(org +present)

Under:

Enable integration with reveal.js, beamer and org-tree-slide, so Emacs can be used for presentations. It automatically downloads reveal.js.

As someone who’s constantly trying to justify the use of Emacs, this was the perfect opportunity.

The process

I’m going to assume you know how to push to a git repo and set remotes

  • I create a directory for the presentation and initialize a git repo
  • Create an org file named index.org

Headers

:REVEAL_PROPERTIES:
#+REVEAL_ROOT: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/reveal.js
#+REVEAL_REVEAL_JS_VERSION: 4
#+REVEAL_PLUGINS: (notes highlight zoom)
#+REVEAL_THEME: white
#+REVEAL_TRANS: linear
:END:
#+OPTIONS: toc:nil num:nil timestamp:nil author:nil
#+TITLE: <insert title>

Exporting to HTML

  • I invoke org-export-dispatch (<C-c C-e> for you non-evil doers 😇) and select the right options
  • This generates an HTML file named index.html

Hosting on GitHub pages

Push to main :) See this guide on publishing your presentation as a static site.

Conclusion

I really like the look of the slides. I don’t enjoy the process of coming up with a layout for my slides and this methodology just checks off a lot of boxes for me.

I still do use PowerPoint and Google Slides for the features they provide such as PowerPoint’s AI-powered Designer.

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