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My reveal.js presentation template

I keep this repo around as a template for presentation slide decks. It is based on reveal.js by Hakim El-Hattab (and contributors), and reflects some presentation "rules" I've defined for myself through trial and error over a few years:

  • I use a white background, with black as the primary foreground color. I've found this to work best even with low-quality projectors and under suboptimal lighting conditions, even for talk attendees with reduced eyesight or seated in the very back row.

  • I use sans-serif fonts (Cabin is my current favorite), with a typewriter-style monospace font (currently, Special Elite) for links and highlights and another, simpler monospace font (Source Code Pro) for code snippets.

  • While I'm presenting, I want the progress bar and controls off. They're visually distracting, and I control the presentation from a remote anyway.

  • Whenever I want to use graphics, I let them stand on their own, with no text, and I use them as a full-screen background. reveal.js, thankfully, makes this very easy, and will "just do the right thing" no matter whether you're presenting on a projector, on a tablet, or on your phone.

  • I always write my slides in Markdown, and make heavy use of speaker notes through the reveal.js notes plugin.

For more information, watch my OSCON 2014 presentation:

Thumbnail of OSCON 2014 presentation video on YouTube

Of course, the slides for that talk use this same approach, so they are hosted here on GitHub Pages, and you can also examine the source code for them.

How to use

Simple: just fork this repo and drop Markdown files into markdown and images into images. Then, fix up index.html to include your Markdown-authored sections.

This repo has two branches, one named master and one gh-pages. Make sure you do your regular work in master, then merge into gh-pages and push both branches. Your presentation will then be rendered to GitHub Pages at a URL of the form:

  • http://username.github.io/presentation-repo-name

You can share the URL immediately, and GitHub will host it for you, indefinitely, for free.

Theming

The theme is defined in css/reveal-override.scss using Sass; if you update this, you will need to re-compile into css/reveal-override.css via:

$ sass css/reveal-override.scss css/reveal-override.css -t expanded -E utf-8

If you are doing continual development on the file, then run this in the background to automatically re-compile every time the .scss file is changed:

$ sass --watch css:css -t expanded -E utf-8

If you are using GitHub Pages, make sure that the latest versions of the generated .css files are committed and pushed to the remote gh-pages branch.

Diagrams

I would generally recommend that you incorporate graphs and diagrams in your presentation using the SVG format, as it ensures that your graphics will look good at any screen resolution — and it also saves bandwidth and improves loading times, compared to high-resolution raster graphics.

My preferred way of drawing diagrams is draw.io, which has a decent SVG export facility. Another option is to export SVG from Google Drawings, or Dia, or even to draw SVG natively in Inkscape.

If you draw diagrams in LibreOffice Draw, see the documentation on incorporating LibreOffice Draw diagrams into reveal.js presentations.

Running things locally

If you want to run your slides locally, rather than on GitHub Pages, just drop them into the DocumentRoot of a web server, like Apache or lighttpd.

For lighttpd, you may also want to set the following options:

dir-listing.encoding = "utf-8"
server.dir-listing   = "enable"
server.modules      += ( "mod_userdir" )
userdir.path         = "public_html"

Use the provided .gitmodules file to automatically clone local copies of reveal.js, qrcodejs, and reveal.js-menu:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Generate the CSS files:

sass --update css:css -t expanded -E utf-8

Then, create a symlink to your Git checkout in ~/public_html, such as:

ln -s ~/git/my-presentation ~/public_html/

... and access your presentation from http://localhost/~yourusername/my-presentation/

Do you find this helpful?

If you find the content in this repo useful, it would be great if you could let me know. You could either star this repo, or even better, send me a happiness packet.