When the time comes to prepare slides for a presentation, PowerPoint or Google Slides are often the first tools that come to mind. They are excellent due to their ease of use and shareability.
However, these platforms have a significant downside: they tend to draw your attention to aesthetic aspects such as positioning, sizing, color schemes, and background images, among others. This focus on design elements can significantly detract from the actual message you're trying to convey and diminish your efficiency in slide creation.
A proficient method to sidestep these distractions is to employ Markdown for writing your slide content.
Markdown compels you to concentrate on the content, offering limited formatting options. This means you'll spend less time on styling and more on your actual material.
There are various tools available for converting Markdown into presentation slides, with Marp and reveal.js being two of the well-known options.
If your objective is to create slides swiftly and efficiently, then Marp is the recommended tool.
Although reveal.js offers extensive functionality and allows for elaborate artistic designs, it can lead to the very over-designing we aim to avoid. Excessive design and formatting can squander time and contribute little to the clarity of your ideas.
In contrast, Marp is simpler and requires little to no setup. Simply write your content in standard Markdown and divide your slides using the --- separator.
This approach enables you to concentrate more on your message and ideas.
Marp also includes tools and plugins to seamlessly integrate into your current writing ecosystem, such as:
- The Obsidian plugin and VSCode plugin for previewing slides while writing in Markdown.
- The Marp to GitHub Page Github template for automatically converting Markdown to a slides web app using GitHub Actions.
- Try Marp now in it's playground 🎡
Consider the following example slides, which are automatically generated by this markdown using Marp.
An additional tip for avid Obsidian users: If you wish to publish your selected Markdown notes as slides on GitHub Pages automatically, create a GitHub repository using the Marp to GitHub Page template. Then, create a hard link from your Markdown files in Obsidian to the docs folder in the repository. The repository's GitHub Actions will transform your Markdown files into slides upon each push. Update your notes in Obsidian, commit and push again, and your slides on GitHub Pages will be refreshed! Voila 🎉
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