title: Yet Another Slideshow Language
author: S Babu
copyright: LGPL
publish_date: 10/28/2002
---
Introduction:
- I want to make presentations in a very easy way.
- Shouldn't there be something that can convert plain text to slides?
---
Requirements:
- PowerPoint is too graphical and resource intensive for me.
- I prefer plain HTML output.
- I should be able to edit using VI.
- I don't care much for animations and graphics.
---
Initial Thought:
- XML with XSL stylesheets:
- I hate typing with angle brackets.
- Who wants to program with XSLT anyway?
- Use LEO to outline:
- Good idea. Need to use Python or XSLT.
- It is pretty easy to program Leo.
- But Leo is a GUI application.
- !!link
href: http://personalpages.tds.net/~edream/front.html
label: Leo outliner
---
Motivation:
- !!link
href: http://bitworking.org/Oct2002.html#X631699464060650032
label: Sam Ruby's modesty!
- !!link
href: http://www.yaml.org/
label: YaML
---
Components:
- Yaml.
- PyYaml.
- Steve Howell's SlideShow idea.
---
Things done so far:
- Installed PyYaml on my local directory:
- Download and put the folder yaml somewhere in Python path.
- Downloaded and installed Steve Howell's slideshow tools:
- Put slides.py somewhere in Python path.
- Adjust slides.py to output HTML as I like it.
- Adjust yaml-slides.py to take a parameter.
- Rename yaml-slides.py to yasl and put it in my path.
- Made a CSS file to my liking.
- Additional properties in the slide template:
- author
- publish_date
- copyright
---
Using it:
- Make a copy of template.yml to a new folder, as somefile.yml
- Type away in somefile.yml
- Then run yasl somefile.yml
- Slides are in index-0.html, index-1.html etc.
---
Missing features:
- Custom templates. Should be easy, but not now.
- Images. May be I'm not able to figure this out, but other than
actually adding img tag, I don't see a way to do this.
- Structured Text formatting in data.
---
Source - template.yml:
- !!read ../template.yml
---
Source - yasl.py:
- !!read /home/vsbabu/software/bin/yasl
---
Source - slides.py:
- !!read /home/vsbabu/site-packages/slides.py
---
Source - this presentation:
- !!read yasl.yml