Previously I talked about using command line tools for efficiency in Command Line Leadership. Since then I’ve changed my flow a bit. LaTex is a fantastic system, and Beamer is great but the templates didn’t have the right look. They were a bit too “academic” in feel. I’ve moved to using RevealJS instead. The included css has a bit more modern feel and is easier to customize than getting into a Beamer template.
The markdown source file is nearly the same, with some slight changes in frontmatter.
---
date: 2021.09.19
title: "Data Team Weekly"
---
# Agenda
- Team Announcements
- Accomplishments and Objectives
- Near-term Priorities
- Engineering Team Updates
- Product Team Updates
# Team Announcements
## 🗣️ Shoutouts 🗣️
pandoc --to=revealjs -V revealjs-url=<path to local revealjs> -V theme=white --self-contained --output=weekly.html --slide-level 2 weekly_template.md
Using this we get an html document that is fully self contained with the revealjs nicities, the css, and any images included in a single file. As a bonus this allows for a bit of two dimensional navigation, having additional slides in a section that can be presented or not depending on the audience and time constraints. In a lot of ways this workflow makes sense, and relies on very proven tools. You would be hard pressed to find a set of display/presentation technologies that have had as much effort put into them as modern browsers, we might as well lean into that and get the benefits when it makes sense.
The only downside to this approach for me is that an html file isn’t the most common thing to share, and it may confuse some people. Thankfully revealjs has a nice “export to pdf” function that takes care of us, by appending /?print-pdf as the query string we get a nicely formatted pdf that doesn’t scare away anyone.