Storytelling and presentation are the keys to a succesful adoption of your ideas. While storytelling is often verbal, a presentation is what stays and often is the thing that decideds whether your stakeholders pay attention or not so much. So it has to be aesthetic, clear and simple.
I show a lot of ideas and often i tend to recreate stuff from my code documentation enriched with diagrams. It is often a tedious work, recreating things in Powerpoint. It bores me and somehow it never looks like i want it to look.
Since i started with this blog and looked into different ways to represent knowledge to others i started using MARP and … i love it!
It simply makes me more productive, efficient and faster.
What is MARP
Marp (also known as the Markdown Presentation Ecosystem) is a fully open-source tool that let’s you transform any Markdown file to a PDF, HTML or PPTX slide deck.
For whom is MARP the right choice?
It’s a rather simple solution capable of basic transformations, figures and tables so it is nothing to create your new super fancy slides for the executive committee. Still it is highly valuable in preparing presentations for your colleagues showing code, math and pictures out of our existing documenation.
It definetly is not for everyone but i like it.
How can i try it out?
It is super easy. It comes as an extension for Virtual Studio Code and can simply be installed and is ready to go from any .md file.
How can i create slides?
1. Create a .md file
Create in any folder an .md file.
2. Add frontmatter
You need to add some boilerplate frontmatter.
frontmatter is like the configuration of a markdown to add more complex data to the content than just text. It has to be on the top of the file and begins and ends with three dashes ---.
It is optional
Each content partial has the following structure layout: partial.
In our case we need to configure the frontmatter to
---
marp: true
---
2. Create Slides
Slides can be created with the use of dashes.
Each slide ends with three dashes ---.
---
marp: true
---
# This my first slide
Some content
---
# This is my second slide
Some other content
2. Export to slide deck
Now you can use the extension and export to a slide of your choosing.
And now you have your first slide deck.
It is fine but how can i make it more fancy?
You have your first slide deck and now want to further tweak the syle of your presentation?
Configuration is given via comments to each slide.
Overall layout:
---
layout: partial
---
Layout for the actual slide and all following:
<!-- _layout: partial -->
Themes
There are different Built-in Themes in MARP which you can use to bring some variety to your slide decks.
They are also fully customizable and you can configure styling for the whole slide deck as well as for only one specific slide.
Code
It is just as in normal markdown. Code blocks are seperated by ```
```
this is my code
```
Math
Again like in normal markdown you need to define math: true in frontmatter and can put in mathematical formulas with $
$x^2$
becomes
$x^2$
Pictures
Again simple markdown syntax
Also easy to resize images
Or set the picture into the background
Or plenty of other tweaks: Image Syntax
CSS
Layouts are fully customizable with CSS stylesheets
<style>
</style>
Presenter Notes
Include Notes which are shown in presentation mode with
<!-- This is a note for my presentation-->
Automated slide decks
Writing markdowns with code is easy and with MARP you can even automatically create slide decks containing results or reports. So you never need to copy paste or send bad looking texts or Excels to anyone.
For this you can use MARP CLI
All conversions require a browser installation but there is also docker-container available.
With a local installtion it would look like the following to convert to pdf.
marp --pdf slide-deck.md
marp slide-deck.md -o converted.pdf
Simple as that.
Try it out!