Since PyCon I’ve continued to think about how I can make slides from
ReStructured Text documents and vice versa. I tend to write a lot of
notes and text while I’m putting together a talk, and I like the idea of
being able to keep slides and text output in sync. I’ve just a batch of
changes to
Hieroglyph, my tool
for doing that. There’s some clean-up there — better handling of output
paths when using things like blockdiag, code clean-up, etc — but there
are two things I’m really excited about. First, two pull requests (one
for Python 3 support, another for some documentation bugs), and second
some new features that I think make Hieroglyph much more powerful.
Thinking about keeping slides and text (HTML) output in sync, it
occurred to me there were probably times you’d want to easily switch
between slides that provide an overview, and the HTML document for more
details and context. Much of the work for 0.3.2 focused on enabling this
interlinking. When enabled, Hieroglyph will add links to your HTML and
Slide output that links to the other format. For HTML this can be
enabled in the sidebar, as well as at the section level. For slides, the
link is added next to each slide’s header, and shows up when you hover
over the header. Check it out on the Hieroglyph
documentation — just hover
over any header and click the § link for the corresponding slides.
When I was working on my PyCon talk, I had anywhere from 50 to 70 slides
in the deck at any given time (NB: yes, this is too many for a talk of
that length). Navigating between them was challenging at times. The
second feature I’ve added to Hieroglyph is designed to address this.
When viewing a Hieroglyph presentation, you can now press the Escape key
to see the Slide Table.
Press Escape again to return to the slide you were on, or click a
slide to jump directly to it. You can try this with the Hieroglyph
documentation slides.
Finally, what should really be considered the third new feature:
expanded documentation. You can find expanded documentation on
configuring Hieroglyph, styling your slides, etc in the docs
online.
There are several additional things I’m working on for Hieroglyph. As
Ilya points out in “All Presentation Software Is
Broken”,
web analytics are your “free lunch” if you use HTML-based slides. I plan
to bake support for that directly into Hieroglyph. As I’m using
Hieroglyph, I’m also realizing that slides don’t always correspond
directly to sections in a document — sometimes (but not always) they’re
a paragraph, list, or something else. Some way to indicate this may be
helpful. If you find Hieroglyph useful (or interesting), let me know
what you’d like to see.
date: | 2012-06-05 13:22:29 |
wordpress_id: | 2123 |
layout: | post |
slug: | hieroglyph-0-3-2 |
comments: | |
category: | projects |
tags: | hieroglyph, rst, slides |