decker

A markdown based tool for slide deck creation.

Installation

Pick a published release, download and unpack:

gunzip decker.gz
chmod a+x decker

Installation from source

1. Install stack.
2. Clone this repo.
3. cd decker
4. make install

External tools

Decker uses a few external tools that need to be installed on the system:

• rsync for publishing slide decks and resources
• unzip to extract resources from the decker executable
• decktape to convert HTML slide decks to PDF format
• LaTeX with pdflatex to generate LaTeX in PDF-files and embedded Tikz figures
• Graphviz to generate graphs using dot
• Gnuplot to generate graphs using dot
• pdf2svg to generate SVG files from PDF documents

Installation of external tools on macOS

Use Homebrew to install most of them.

brew install rsync unzip graphviz gnuplot pdf2svg

For the rest follow instructions on their respective webites.

Usage

decker behaves very much like a build tool. It works recursively on the current directory and all subdirectories. Markdown files ending on .md in those directories are processed and converted to either a reveal.js slide show, a HTML document, or a PDF document, depending on the file name.

• *-deck.md

  Files with this ending are processed as silde decks. From one source file potentially four different targets can be generated:

  • *-deck.html A reveal.js based slide show
  • *-handout.hmtl A HTML document containing the speaker notes to the slide show.
  • *-deck.pdf A PDF version of the slide show
  • *-handout.pdf A PDF version of the handout

• *-page.md

  Markdown files ending on *-page.md are translated into corresponding HTML or PDF documents.

decker targets

• decker help

  Prints a help document to stdout in Markdown format.

• decker html

  Builds HTML versions of all available documents.

• decker pdf

  Builds PDF versions of all documents that are generated from *-page.md files.

• decker pdf-decks

  Builds PDF versions of all slide decks (requires decktape.sh).

• decker watch

  Builds HTML versions of all documents and then watches for document changes. Each change to a watched document triggers a rebuild. Watching can be terminated with ^C.

• decker server

  Like decker watch. Additionally a local web server is started that serves the generated HTML files. The *-deck.html file is openend in the browser. Changed files are reloaded in the browser. (still requires livereloadx)

• decker example

  Write a few example files to the current directory. To start exploring decker type

  $ decker example
  $ decker server

  and make some changes to the Markdown files. example-deck.md contains the source code for a slide deck that is supposed to (someday) explain most of the features supported.

• decker clean

  Recursively removes all generated files from the current directory.

• decker plan

  Prints a list of all source files found below the current directory.

• decker meta

  Pretty prints all meta data that can be found in *.yaml files in the current directory and below. Meta data is mainly used to perform substitutions in Markdown documents using the Mustache templating system.

• decker publish

  Publish the generated files to a remote location using rsync if the location is specified in the meta data. The keys rsync-destination.host and rsync-destination.path specify the publishing destination.

Contributions

Pull requests

Contributions are accepted via pull requests. Before working on a feature, please write up an issue and discuss it with the other developers.

CI build checks

The decker repository has a GitLab CI runner configured, that builds and runs all tests for each commit on every branch. Look at the status display for recent run of the CI pipelines.

Haskell source code formatting

Haskell soure code readability depends heavily on consistent formatting conventions. With decker, formatting is automated using the excellent hindent tool. Formatting is checked for each commit that is uploaded to the GitLab repository.