I love that "offline-ready" is a feature that's becoming more and more supported and prominent. I don't know anyone else in the power user community who doesn't have home internet, but since getting rid of ours, I've made that feature a high priority of all apps I've been dreaming up and selling.

I've even gone so far as to remove the concept of "live data sync" from all my apps, partially because it's so incredibly error prone and hard to get right, partially because it tends to make software seem laggy and slow since it shows stale data while loading live data in the background, and partially because usually it's unneeded as a built-in feature if you're just using files, which can then be synced with any of the many file syncing service (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box).

Although it's very doubtful other power users will adopt internet-less lives, if more of us did, not only would we be more productive, but we'd all have more incentive to make "offline-ready" a much better experience and even move to "offline-first" like I aim to.

This looks cool. Looking forward to give it a try.

For years I've been using Deckset[0] for all my presentations. Being able to just edit a text file to write and update slides is a massive advantage. I usually export them as pdf, which 99% of conferences are happy with.

A big bonus is that you can now version control your slides, allow them to get forked, etc.

If you're curious to see what those slides look like, check any of my previous talks [1].

[0]: https://www.deckset.com/

[1]: http://jobv.gitlab.io/talks/

When I looked at it, I was like, "huh .. it's a lot like reveal.js" and then I looked carefully at the README and it is reveal.js, with extensions/mods.

I've used reveal.js for a while. I found it most useful when I did presentations for multiple meetups on the same open source project. I created a little build tool that let me re-use slides for Ruby, Scala and Python meetups (the service was written in Scala, client in Python and devops was all Ruby, but that's since been migrated to Docker):

https://github.com/bigsense/presentations

http://bigsense.github.io/

Tools like this are great if you have several similar presentations. Some of the additions in Markdeck are things I've kinda hacked in (like terminal output players). Still with a recent presentation where I did everything from scratch, I used the same build process and found it felt a bit much for something that didn't require the shared-slides use case and I wondered if I would have just saved time writing it in a GUI/WYSIWYG tool like OpenOffice or Powerpoint.

My only feedback is to commend the author on including a "Similar projects" section in the README file. I love when authors are not afraid to compare their projects to other similar pieces of work.

I've been using Backslide [0] for all my lecture slides for a couple years now, seems quite similar. Backslide doesn't use pandoc though.

[0]: https://github.com/sinedied/backslide

This is really nice, especially all the integrations. I've been using slides.com for a while, and I may switch to this. But, one feature that would be amazing would be the ability to upload to an S3 bucket. Bonus points for creating a public bucket configured correctly to view the slides. It's annoying to have to carry every possible type of dongle and fight with A/V issues at random places when you need to show a deck on hardware that you don't control. I always make sure that the content I need to show is available on any machine with an internet connection, but it takes a lot of effort sometimes.

So Markdeck lets you use ascii art via pandoc, as well as generating slides from text with titles, background images and background colors. It can also generate slides with "hand-written sketches" as in the complete slideshow: https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/showcase/#/example-te...

I tried to help by putting in a change request, but couldn't exactly figure out where the slides were coming from.

I'm definitely going to look into that one. As a blind user who needs to do presentations sometimes, I hate wysiwyg and I always use text-based tools. My favorite is Spectacle [1], as it apparently looks pretty good and I can upload presentations to now with a nice, simple, memorable URL. It's amazing when you can just open up a browser, point it to an URL you remember and the presentation just opens.

[1] https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle

FYI: Slideshow (S9) is another free (open source) alternative offering themes / template packs for reveal.js, bespoke.js, impress.js ("prezi-style"), s5, s6, shower, and more. See http://slideshow-s9.github.io and https://github.com/slideshow-templates

Golang has a similar tool called 'present' [0]. Sample presentation: https://talks.golang.org/2017/state-of-go-may.slide

[0] https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present

The reason I use Markdeck for all presentations is the care that the author has lavished on the many, many integrations. Anyone can render to PDF, but few tools produce pixel perfect PDF you can hand to your audience afterwards. Not to forget CSS3 backgrounds, Vega Lite charts mixed with TeX formulas and DITAA - full support for anything the browser will put up with.

How is this better than https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#producing-slide-shows-with-pa... ? Oh! You've got other yummy things rolled in there like graphviz and more. Thanks! I've got an important presentation coming up on Thursday, I'll give this a go!

Shameless plug: Being a lecturer, I wrote something similar years ago: https://github.com/munen/p_slides

p_slides doesn’t have any dependency that doesn’t run in the browser and its files can be checked into SCM which makes collaboration easy.

What advantage does this have over just using reveal.js's support for external markdown document for slides?

This is super awesome!! I wish it didn't spam the hell out of my browser history though.

Are there plans to enable remote control functionality, such as https://github.com/jpsim/DeckRocket ?

What I always miss in Markdown-ish mathjax-enabled tools is the ability to define symbols globally. E.g. in latex I always do "\renewcommand{\d}{\mathrm d} \newcommand{\re}{\mathbb R}" etc.

Are there plans for Linux / Windows support? I don't own any Apple hardware, so I can't even try this, but if it works well I'd be happy to pay for it.

The title says collaborative, but the about says: "easy to collaborate-n-reuse: text-only, so bring your own VCS"

If it requires a VCS isn't everything collaborative?

"text-only" is a good description of bad slides to me. Why do people do that? The are plenty of Markdown slides tools so there seems to be a need.

How does it ASCII to sketch work? (I am particularly interested in this "sketchy" example.)

i love how topics like these not only bring out a review of the tool in question, but also suggest other related tools for comparison.

for convenience, here is a list of all alternatives mentioned (in no particular order):

(i added a quick but incomplete review of key aspects of each tool. almost all are using markdown and support pdf export)

https://arnehilmann.github.io/markdeck/ (reveal.js docker)

https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#producing-slide-shows-with-pa... (export-to: S5 DZSlides Slidy Slideous reveal.js pdf ppt)

https://github.com/munen/p_slides (slidy2)

https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present (go-present-markup local-go-server "can't find documentation of how to actually use it")

http://slideshow-s9.github.io/ (commandline-tool browser-preview many-templates)

https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle (react-based presenter-mode local-node-server)

https://github.com/sinedied/backslide (docker)

https://gitpitch.com/ (online-service 'desktop version is docker based and not free')

https://yhatt.github.io/marp/ (electron-app live-preview)

https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck (browser-preview)

https://www.deckset.com/ (osx-only not-free)

https://github.com/arnehilmann/markdeck#similar-projects

Does this support LaTeX? Or can support be added via a plugin?

Text heavy slide creation tools (such as LaTeX and Markdown based ones) are aimed to make slide creation easier, not actually watching the resulting presentation. It's not to say that you cannot make nice slides with those tools, but using systems that make it much easier to write text than to visualize really promotes the wrong thing for presentations.

People don't tend to notice this as much though, and they are more concerned with familiarity or speed-of-production of the slides rather than make the slides effective for the audience. But hey, that same issue can be raised for most PowerPoint presentations, too. People just don't know how to make good slides and just take whatever is easiest for them.

This does allow you to embed images and diagrams. I think they rather mean the slide description language is text-only.

But even embedded images implies uninspiring slides to me.

For example they have a system that allows you to add source code to a slide, but then don't you want to be annotating that code? Adding arrows, lines, highlighting bits, breaking it apart, etc?

This is something that I've been intrigued about too. Most of the cli/text based creation tools out there focus on text based content as well. But, for many people myself included, the desire is really for a text based creation tool that focuses on image or diagram based output. Features like auto tiling (with priority) of images on a slide would be useful.

So many people end up writing what should be their presentation notes as their slide content. Personally I think you're better off with a holding image and move your content to the presenter notes section.

I've used revealjs.com and hovercraft [1] in the past but usually end up on GSuite Slides to throw things together quickly. Slides (like PowerPoint) can't do branching presentation paths though :(

[1] https://github.com/regebro/hovercraft

"text-only" here means, that the _source_ of the slides is text-based (in contrast to the classic graphical tools like powerpoint or pages).

the resulting slides can be as colourful (and text-less) as you want...