Talkify

I realised that I was sick of futzing around with Google Slides for simple presentations, so I made a plain text to HTML slides compiler. There are many like it, but this is mine. I called it Talkify.

The input it takes is very simple: each line is a slide, and lines indented with a dash are points in the slide. The following is a tiny talk about it:

talkify.png
What is Talkify?
- A tiny compiler of text to slides.
- Ingests simple text format.
- Produces standalone HTML files.
Why?
- It was easier than dealing with Google slides.

Invoke the script like this:

python talkify.py example.txt > example.html

And this comes out!

The script compiles this to a standalone HTML file which you can then navigate using space and the arrow keys. To change the styling of the slides, you can just edit the CSS in talkify.py. CSS is a lot nicer than having to deal with master slides.

And since it just literally includes the slide titles and points, you can use HTML markup in there to further style things.

As a convenience, if you make a slide with a title that looks like an image URL, it will display that image as the slide.

So this is super-minimal, but I personally like really simple slides, so it suits me well. Maybe it suits you too, which is why I did this quick write-up.