The Easiest Way to Make Presentations! (Pandoc + Markdown)

all right so I figure it's about at the end of the semester for most people so I guess it's worth giving a nice little paradigm for making little presentations because I figure a lot of people might need to do that for whatever reason or just you know any other reason in your life so in this video we're gonna make probably the easiest to make presentations you possibly can so what we're gonna use is a program called pan dock so pan dock is probably I don't know it's a whole world of knowledge it's really just a program that converts documents of any type to documents of any other talk type that's why it's called pan dock so we're gonna use that to create presentations really just from little tiny notes we make so I'm gonna CD into this folder pan doc that I've created and I'm gonna create a file called pres MD so this is gonna be a markdown file written in markdown if you don't know markdown you don't need to know it because it's literally the easiest thing in the world let me teach you so you have a number sign and this is a section heading so you know here is text you can have this is a list you know another list item etc etc you can have another section heading with pretty much the same way you had the other one before you can have sub sub sections so sub sub section and here's some text in that so really markdown is a nice way of you know making notes and stuff like this a lot of people use it I have syntax highlighting and stuff so I have them markdown installed it's nice to have just because it gives you a little a nice little perks when you're writing it but anyway it's actually really easy to convert one of these into a slideshow so if you're taking notes let's say you're taking notes about a presentation you want to do and you want to instantly convert that into the presentation it's actually super easy so I'm gonna actually go to that same folder now it's actually really easy to use pan doc to do this what you do is you just run and all you give a the file you want it to convert and to convert it into a presentation you're gonna want to take the CTA or the T tag and say Beamer so those of you who watch the channel may know Beamer of course is law Tech's way of you know making slideshows so we're actually taking this and converting it to law Tech converting it to Beamer and we're our outputs gonna be a Beamer file so then you give it Oh for the output and we're just gonna call it pres de f just make sure it's a PDF file so after you run that we now should have a compiled PDF in our folder so I'm gonna open that up and you will see sure enough what actually happens is it takes each one of these let me make this a little more visible it takes each one of these section headings and it converts them into a an actual slide and you also see that this sub subsection is you know some other kind of you know sub section in the slide so that's nice but this is this presentation is actually super simple I mean I guess it's nice if you want to go things you go through things herself but it's a little ugly if you actually want to present it so what you can do is actually give it a bunch of metadata with extra information so you can have a title slide and change the color and stuff like that and that's pretty easy to do what you do is you really just have some hyphens you have three hyphens in a row and in between those you can start putting metadata for it to use so for example let's say we want a title for our thing we will put title and I'll say Luke's presentation something simple like that you can also put author and I'll put my name now oops I'm going to recompile that it might take a second there we go so now we have a title slide and it has our author pretty simple enough and it has the slides we expected so if you want to change the color the nice thing is since this is a actually a Beamer presentation you can use any of beamers themes it has by default or color themes to change the way it looks so let's say we want the theme my favorite is Copenhagen so Copenhagen recompile that and so that gives your presentation you know the kind of color you might want so you know this looks a lot better than just the nothingness this subsection has a nice little sectioned off area everything's a bit more colorful a little bit easier on the eyes and you can also have Beamer color themes so if you don't know these just look them up just look up Beamer themes or whatever there's a list of them you can also download other ones if you want but these are I'm just using ones that are there by default if you have law tech installed which by the way you might have to if you're doing this although it's probably a requirement the pan dolls by default so anyway now we have a basic presentation I actually don't like this color thing it's a little too little too much but so it's important to know that pretty much everything you can do in markdown you can integrate into this presentation so let's say we want to have another slide and that's going to be text formatting so the main reason you want might want to do this is just because it's a lot easier to write and markdown than it is in law tech or something if you actually want to do it in Beamer I do use Beamer if I need like references and stuff I think there's actually a way to do that in pen doc but I haven't done it yet but anyway you can do stuff like full text just with two little stars around it they disappear when I'm not on the line but that's not important you can have emphatic text where it's really italic so usually how it shows up you can even have strikethrough stuff like that so basic text formatting works the same way and you can also have images let me actually first show you this works right so we have bull text and fatik italic strikethrough you can also have images so and it actually uses typical markdown syntax let me actually this so the syntax for that is pretty simple it's just exclamation point then inside brackets you say the the name of whatever picture you want what you're gonna call it in the presentation so I'll say you know a picture of me and then in parentheses this is just markdown syntax you put whatever the file name of it is I happen to have a file X stuff PNG which is just a picture of me in this directory so I'm gonna recompile that and now we have a picture okay that's actually a pretty creepy picture but it works it does work so this is pretty much the easiest way that I know of just the sort of bust out well a you can bust out a presentation really easily and the nice thing that is better about this then is about you know PowerPoint or something is I can very easily take text from one slide and move it to another depending on whatever text editor you have it's not like PowerPoint where you have to copy and pasting things from all over the place and it's a little better than beamer at least for doing basic stuff I mean actual Beamer in law Tech just because you avoid a lot of the sometimes cumbersome syntax of law tech I find that this is really easy for just busting out a presentation in just a couple minutes and the other nice thing is a lot of times if especially if you're the kind of person who takes notes in markdown anyway you can very easily just sort of bust open your text edit or do whatever note-taking you usually do and later on just convert that into a slideshow just for your own good even if you don't plan on presenting it even if you just want to look at your notes in a better way so this is actually a very small portion of Panda itself I encourage you to bust open your terminal and type in man pen doc and read all the kind of magic you can do but hopefully this is helpful so hopefully you guys guys enjoyed it so see you next time

Channel: Luke Smith

Views: 109,696

Rating: 4.9336915 out of 5

Keywords: latex, power point, not related, quick, docx, slideshow, document, slides, markdown, frame, md, easy, slide show, format, fast, pdf, luke smith, pandoc, beamer, powerpoint, mark down, tex, slide, doc, podcast

Id: dum7q6UXiCE

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2017