Slide Presentations

Judging from how existing markdown to slideshows work. E.g. swipe and here is its tutorial

  1. Each slide is separated using a horizontal rule --- for example in remark and * * * for swipe
  2. The first H1 after each horizontal rule, is the title for the slide example
  3. Search replace variables, so you don’t have to type certain words over again. (e.g. #define in C) http://gnab.github.io/remark/#11 . Could be done via generic directives.
  4. Some way to apply styling to a specific slide
  5. Inline notes for presenter (not shown in actual side). Remark uses fenced ??? block to indicate notes http://gnab.github.io/remark/#15 . I think there is an opportunity to allow for transcription that allows for text-to-speech automatic presentations.

So hopefully whatever we make for the final spec, has enough handling to allow for consistent writing of slideshows. This is a very good use case for office workers, since a lot of time is wasted in just styling a slideshow.

We do need a document layout declaration to indicate to user that this should be treated as a slideshow. Layout: slideshow e.g.

!CommonMark: 0.1.23-github.username.projectname
 Title:      A Slide Show Presentation
 Date:       32-4-2002
 Layout:     slideshow

There are currently so many different ways that different tools do this, it’s not clear how to unify and standardize this. Picking out specific problem areas and addressing them in more general terms, such as the explicit sections problem, might be a better way forward.

A slide show is also mainly a matter of presentation, whereas CommonMark just specifies an AST, so that seems quite far removed.