In this Wiki you will find documentation and instructional material for Decker. Decker software and this Wiki are under active development. Use our feedback and bug tracker if you run into problems or want to share your ideas with us. Just open a new issue!

Welcome to Decker

Decker is an e-authoring tool for the creation of web-based educational content.

• Welcome to Decker
• Setup
  • Windows
  • MacOS
  • Linux
• First Steps
  • Windows
  • MacOS
  • Opening a presentation
• Creating your first presentation
• Contents of a Decker project folder
  • File paths

Setup

This section will lead you through downloading and installing decker on your system.

Windows

Download: Windows Installer

• Click the link and download the Microsoft Installer file, Decker-nightly.msi.
• Find the file in your Downloads folder and install Decker by double clicking it and following the installer instructions.
• If you have installed Decker previously you might need to manually uninstall the previous version. The Windows installer does not yet support automatic reinstallation.

MacOS

Download: MacOS Installer

• Click the link and download the MacOS package Decker-nightly.pkg.
• Find the file in your Downloads folder. Right-click to open the file and follow the installer instructions.

Linux

A linux executable is available here: decker-linux-nightly

• Rename the file to decker.
• Enter chmod +x decker on the command line to make the file executable.
• Move the executable to a directory that is on $PATH to be able to use decker anywhere.

First Steps

After downloading the correct Decker version for your operating system from the Setup, follow this guide to learn the basics of Decker.

Windows

• Use the Windows file explorer to navigate to a folder suitable for saving presentations. We suggest creating a new folder e.g. C:\Users\<username>\Documents\presentations.
• Open a Console by typing powershell in the address bar of the file explorer.
• Continue with subsection Opening a presentation.

MacOS

• Use Finder to navigate to a folder suitable for saving presentations. We suggest creating a new folder e.g. /Users/<username>/Documents/presentations.
• Open a Console by right clicking the folder symbol and choosing Services > New Terminal at Folder.
• Continue with subsection Opening a presentation.

Opening a presentation

• Type decker example in the Console. This will generate a new folder named example.
• Navigate to this new folder by typing cd example in the Console. If you close the Console the presentation might not be loaded correctly, therefore we recommend to only close the Console after concluding the presentation.
• Type decker server in the Console. This command will open a local web server.
• Open a web browser (we recommend Google Chrome). If you don't have another instance of this server running open, type http://localhost:8888/ in the address bar.
• You should now see a Decker presentation designed to provide an overview of some of the features that Decker offers.
• To close the server created by Decker, either close the Console or terminate the process by using the keyboard shortcut.

Many of our users simply use decker example and rename/modify the example-deck to create their own presentation.

Creating your first presentation

Now we will get into creating your own presentations with Decker:

• Keep decker server and your browser window on localhost:8888 running in the background.
• Create and open a file called e.g. minimal-deck.md in the example folder.
• Your presentation files must have the ending -deck.md.
• Copy the following text or write your own. We recommend text editors such as Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code.

# This is a new slide!

Lorem ipsum

## This is a sub-heading

dolor sit

# This is slide number two!

amet

• Save the file and take a look at your browser window. On the Generated Index page under Slide decks there should be a new presentation called minimal-deck.html
• The presentation running in your browser window will update itself with any changes made to the -deck.md file after saving it.

Contents of a Decker project folder

In the simplest case, a new Decker presentation consists of the following files:

• decker.yaml: A file containing configuration option. If you have never used Decker before you should copy the one that is located in the example folder generated by Decker.
• At least one file called *-deck.md. This is a text file in the popular Markdown format.

After running e.g. decker server, Decker will have generated additional files and folders:

• public: This folder contains your generated html presentation and files that are needed by the html files to look nice and function during a presentation. Everything in public is generated or copied automatically and will be so again if the folder is deleted.
• .decker: A hidden folder (depending on your system settings you might not even see it) where some auto-generated files are located. This folder is unimportant for you as a user.

File paths

Paths to local file resources that are referenced by slide sets need to be provided in several contexts. For example:

• as a URL in an image tag to locate local media files like images or videos (learn more about including media files on the page Media)

  ## A very important image
  ![](image.png)

• as the value of meta data variables, for example to provide the location of the bibliography database and the citation style definition

  bibliography: /bib/bibliography.tex
  csl: /bib/chicago-author-data.csl

In any case, path values for local file resources are interpreted either as relative to the defining file, if specified as a relative path, or as relative to the project root directory, if specified as an absolute path.

Consider the following project layout and file contents:

project
├── images
│   └── image.png
└── slides
    └── slide-deck.md

slides/slide-deck.md contains:

# First slide

![Project relative path](/images/image.png)
![Document relative path](../images/image.png)

Both image paths reference the same image file.