Drop #155 (2022-12-13): Twelve Days of [Quick] Drops • Day 02

decksh; pptxer; mdp

On The Second Day Of Quick Drops 🎅🏽hrbrmstr🎅🏽 Gave To Me…

🎶 Three slide deck tools… 🎶

(see yesterday's drop if you're confused abt what the heck is going on with these drops)

Halls are the only things to be decked at this time of year, and today's drop features three alternative tools to make or scrape spiffy presentations in a futile effort to convince Santa that you were, in fact, more nice than naughty this past year.

decksh

decksh humblebrags that it is "a little language for presentations, visualizations, and information displays". While that is true, it outputs some very shiny decks with very little work.

In fact, it used itself to make a very nice 'splainer about itself, which you should read through to get an idea of the “what/when/why/where/how”.

It can output to SVG, PNG, or PDF, and you can riff from a ton of pre-made decks to help get you started.

pptxer

Photo by Igor Cancarevic on Unsplash

pptxer is a "fast high-level Presentations Scraper for Python and Command Line".

While there are many ways to turn PPTX documents into something actually useful, this tool does a bit more than just that.

With pptxer, you can scour the internet for presentations based on any set of keywords you input, and it will turn them into lovely JSON files. e.g.

pptxer download "COVID-19 Safety" "Contagious diseases" --dst test_dir

You can also process a local directory of PPTX files (or just a single one) into the same JSON format (which I cannot show due to how lame Substack's code blocks are).

This could be a great way to preserve useful information and also do a bit of research (in "google" mode).

mdp

mdp is a "command-line based markdown presentation tool" that relies on ncurses to do the heavy terminal lifting.

The sample markdown file showcases the syntax pretty well, and the section header is an animation of one of the decks.

Sometimes, it's nice to just be in the terminal for everything, including presentations, especially when you have a bunch of text or code to walk through.

FIN

Regardless of your own naughty/nice percentage, I'm not sure a dude who requires milk-and-cookie bribes in exchange for presents has any business challenging the ethics of others. ☮