How do you make slides for programming talks?

Posted by Yuvi Masory on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Yuvi Masory
Published on 2011-02-25T18:56:29Z Indexed on 2011/02/25 23:33 UTC
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I've given a few talks recently and I have not found a good way to make slides. Here are a few desirable characteristics for programming slides:

  • They're slides. A standard emacs buffer won't do it.
  • They have syntax highlighting for code.
  • They support basic formatting, like font size and color and bullets.
  • No fancy animations needed. The only animation I desire is one-by-one appearance of bullets.

So far I have considered:

  • Microsoft Office - out of the question for Linux users.
  • OpenOffice.org - too much for my needs, code formatting/highlighting needs to be done externally and pasted in. On the plus side supports bullets, bullet-by-bullet animation, and font formatting.
  • Emacs - Supports all the code formatting but I haven't found a slides mode that lets me transition from one chunk to another.
  • HTML5 - I once made slides using html5rocks as a template. It supports everything, but is too hard and time-consuming the "throw together" a few slides before a minor talk. Also the html5-only features may not work on the podium computer's installed browser.

Any suggestions for programs/techniques for making code-centric presentations?

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