Playing with Landslide

I frequently find myself in the position of needing a fairly good-looking presentation in a big fat hurry, and up till now I’ve only really had two choices for dealing with that:

1. Write it in Latex, get a great looking presentation three days after I need it.
2. Use Google Docs, get a terrible looking presentation just in time to have it hated by my audience.

Obviously, neither of these is a good option, and when I got scheduled to give a short presentation this last Friday I set out to find an alternative. What I found is called Landslide.

So, what is it? Basically it lets you write your slides like a sanely formatted Markdown document and turn them into a web-ready presentation. You can see an example here. Why am I excited about that? Three reasons:

1. It lets me use Markdown extensions, including justinvh’s Markdown-Latex extension. That means that I can insert Latex mathematical notation and get Latex-quality results. Excellent!
2. It produces even better-looking slides than Beamer, and they can include video- a sore point in dealing with Latex.
3. It’s ridiculously fast to write- no heavy syntax, no messy \begin{…} \end{…}. It’s like they Huffman coded Latex.

So, I’m quite happy. The only thing I wasn’t happy about was the PITA that was finding and installing everything on Ubuntu. In the event that anybody’s interested, here’s what I had to do:

First, grab landslide (you’ll need git, setuptools, and python-markdown) from the link above. Run the setup script just like you would normally.

After that, you’ll need to download and install the Latex-Markdown extension. I had to make some minor modifications (available here) to use it, but YMMV. Once you’ve done that, copy it to your Markdown extensions folder. For me, it was easier just to run:

user@host: ~$ find /usr/lib | grep markdown/extensions

than to try and reason about where that might actually be. Copy the latex.py file into that directory and make sure its permissions match.

After that, you just have to use Landslide itself. Fortunately, it’s very easy to use- I just run:

user@host: ~$ landslide -x latex -t tango slides.md

where slides.md is the path to the Markdown file where my slides are defined and Tango is my preferred theme.

Pretty awesome, really.