Using Emacs Episode 50 - presentations

Next weekend I'll be attending the Computer Science Teachers Association's annual conference. It's probably the biggest conference focussed on K12 Computer Science education. This year, in addition to attending, I'll be giving a talk on preservice and inservice CS teacher preparation programs. I'll be talking about the new New York State certification requirements along with what we're rolling out at Hunter College.

This means putting together a slide deck for the session. When I have to work collaboratively with non-Emacs users, I will usually go to Google Docs for presentations. It works and the collaborative aspects are nice but tools like Google Docs and Powerpoint are designed around composing slides manually. I much prefer to use a tool where I can focus on writing my presentation and have the tool turn it into a presentation.

Org-mode is of course the ideal tool. As an outliner, it lends itself to organizing a talk:

* topic 1
   the content for slide one
* topic 2
   the content for slide two
* topic 3
   etc.

I can embed code, tables, images, and more. I can also cycle visibility so I can focus on individual sections. Org-mode also has a number of export options to take a plain org file which is just ascii with markup and export it as a presentation. In the video, I'll take a quick look at ox-beamer, which exports to a Beamer presentation in LaTeX and then a PDF, epresent which presents right in Emacs and finally ox-reveal wich creates a reveal.js presentation. I ultimately decide to continue to use ox-reveal as it's pretty simple and flexible and I can also directly serve the final presentation from my own laptop, a usb drive, or directly from GitHub.

Check out the video to see how. If you want more information on using ox-reveal check out my earlier Using Emacs post and video.