iA Writer is a very famous Markdown writing software known for its simple and beautiful interface and good user experience (although I have not used it). And recently, iA.net, the developer of iA Writer, released a slideshow production software called iA Presenter, which aims to create beautiful slideshows with simple Markdown.
There are countless software for making slideshows on the market. In addition to the common PowerPoint and Keynote, there are also Prezi, reveal.js, Canva, etc. based on HTML5 technology. There are also many softwares that generate slideshows based on documents. , document tools Yuque, Feishu documents, and graphite documents all have presentation modes.
Among so many softwares, what advantages does iA Presenter have, and it is worth looking up from the complicated work.
First of all, iA Presenter is still in a very early stage, and some of the content mentioned in this article may be changed at any time due to software version updates.
In addition, iA Presenter will be referred to as iA Pre for short.
Here, I would also like to thank @南山居氪for the invitation code of iA Presenter provided.
what happened to PowerPoint
It seems that a lot of software is now being released in a revolutionary stance—thinking that its birth can disrupt an industry, at least when it is released with some articles explaining its design philosophy. Roam and Arc do, and iA Pre has some of that.
iA published two articles on its news page, mainly on what’s wrong with traditional slideshow tools like PowerPoint , and how can iA Pre make slideshows better? .
In the first article 1 , iA believes that the traditional slideshow tools represented by PPT are difficult to get started, take a long time, make the speaker forget what he wants to say, and most of the speeches with PPT are very boring. Are our professional killers and career killers.
How does iA make the slideshow better?
And in the second article2, iA presents what they think are ways to make presentations and slideshows better:
content
- Writing stage, focus only on content
- You can directly copy and paste already written documents and emails
- Keep what is said and what is shown separate (i.e. don’t read PPT when speaking)
- Slideshows need to have pictures and other content to attract attention
- Speeches need rehearsal, so you can be more calm when speaking
design
- Responsive design like a web page
- The layout is done automatically by the software
- Highly readable handouts
In general, since iA Pre is a tool for making slideshows in Markdown, its design philosophy is similar to that of Markdown. Next, I will also introduce the experience of using iA Pre from the aspects of content writing and slide design.
In terms of content, Markdown is the core creation process
When iA Pre is opened for the first time, the biggest difference from the well-known PPT is the middle part of the interface, that is, the “Editor” part. The editor of PPT is the production and design of slides, while the editor of iA Pre is a Markdown document editor.
If you want, hide the columns on both sides of iA Pre and even use it as a Markdown editor, but unlike other Markdown editors, iA Pre saves in a proprietary *.iapresenter format.
Perhaps inheriting the excellent editing experience of iA Writer, the editing of iA Pre is also very good, and it also supports the switching of focus mode, grammar prompts and monospaced fonts. A carriage return can also be selected in the settings.
You can paste the written speech in the format of Markdown text, or complete the writing directly in the editor of iA Pre, and then you can make a slight modification on the basis of the speech to generate a complete slide.
The way to modify is also very simple, in the paragraph that needs to be displayed, press the Tab button. At the same time, slide paging is also done by using Markdown’s dividing line --- to paginate.
That is to say, iA Pre is not like the presentation mode of other document tools such as Yuque Document (below) or Feishu Document, which directly enlarges and rearranges the document to become the demo version, but requires the author to Pick the paragraphs that need to be shown to the audience, and what isn’t picked is still part of the speech.
This design of separation of presentation and presentation may be a better place for iA Pre to handle than the presentation mode that comes with document tools such as Obsididan and Feishu Documents. It also makes iA Pre more like a slideshow tool than other document tools. . This way of making slides can force the speaker to select important paragraphs in the speech to a certain extent, and may avoid the embarrassing scene of “going to the stage to read PPT”.
After the slideshow is created, click the “Play” button in the upper left corner to start the slideshow. Different from PPT, iA Pre will not open the show page in full screen by default, but will open a small window for slide show. You can manually drag this window to show it on an external monitor. The main window of the software will become a teleprompter page.
If it is a slideshow software such as PPT and Keynote, it will provide more abundant but complicated options during the show. By default, the slide show page of PPT is displayed on the full screen, and the main window of the software will also retreat to the background. Of course, PPT and Keynote also have a speaker window, and also have the function of “showing in a small window”, only But it needs to be turned on manually.
The main window of the iA Pre software during the show can completely preview the document written in Markdown format, and reflect which slide is currently being shown through the color block.
In comparison, the speaker reminder function of PPT and Keynote is slightly crude and “less important”. Keynote also supports colored fonts, although some simple rich text options are also available. However, compared with iA Pre, the speaker prompts of PPT and Keynote are more of a secondary role, just playing the role of “prompt”, while iA’s is more like a main “teleprompter”.
PPT and Keynote also have a function, that is, you can continue to edit the slideshow in the main window of the software while the slideshow is playing. There was also “the saddest press conference in history” – a presentation and a slideshow. This ability to edit while showing is not possible in iA Pre.
In terms of export, iA Pre can export slides to Markdown, PDF and HTML formats. When choosing to export to PDF, you can further choose the export option. You can choose the format of slide export here, or export Markdown documents. for handouts.
The PDF handouts exported by iA Pre do not have much problems in the format. Compared with PPT, which needs to be filled in the remarks section, it seems more convenient for iA Pre to generate handouts directly through Markdown text. Compared with other Markdown editors, the mixing of graphics and text is also much more refined, but the Chinese fonts seem to have some small problems. Even if the font is adjusted to the system default in the software, it will only affect the font of the slideshow, and the font of the handout does not seem to be customizable.
You can also choose to export only slides, or both slides and handouts. The font at this time seems to use the custom font in the software, and there is no situation that some Chinese characters have different fonts.
However, iA Pre does not provide *.pptx and *.key , two common slideshow formats on the two major systems, but the HTML format can ensure that the slideshow can be played smoothly on most systems as much as possible.
In addition, iA Pre also supports restoring to the previous file version through the file version backtracking function that comes with macOS.
Design, relatively simple customizability
Most speeches are probably the place to show your personality, and the style of your slides is one of the most important components of a speech’s personality. In this regard, compared to PPT or the more praised Keynote, and iA Pre’s remarkable content writing, it seems to be a little good.
The iA Pre software has many built-in themes named after cities. You can also create a new theme in settings, then open the theme folder and customize it by editing the theme’s CSS and JSON files. You can also copy the theme that comes with the software and modify it on the basis of the theme that comes with the software.
It seems that it is very free to customize the theme through CSS, but the theme of iA Pre only involves the font and background color of the slideshow (at least for now, the theme that comes with the software is like this). The layout of the slides is not involved. That is to say, the current slide layout can only be automatically completed by iA Pre using its built-in templates, and cannot be customized.
However, iA Pre provides the function of exporting to HTML, and you can modify the original file after exporting HTML, but this will put the cart before the horse. (You can also see some easter eggs after exporting to HTML)
The large screens in many venues are not standard 16:9 or 4:3 screens. When using PPT or projections, text and pictures are often distorted due to different screen ratios. In this regard, iA Pre may have done it. Better than PPT. When iA Pre is presenting the scene, the slideshow is adaptive like a web page, and can automatically adapt to various screen sizes, which is convenient for the audience to watch on different devices, and can also be adapted to different sizes of venue screens. Of course, you can also choose to lock the “4:3”, “16:9” or “9:16” size in the software settings.
Overall, the experience of iA Pre is very Apple-like, that is, it provides a good creative experience in the content part, but in the design part, the options that can be customized are relatively poor. However, the iA Pre is still in a very early stage, and it is not known what direction the iA Pre will be thinking after its official release.
Two orientations of slides
Perhaps, the development of slideshows should go in two different directions, one is represented by Keynote and PPT, and beautifully designed slides are used in press conferences and major speeches. The other direction is represented by iA Pre, a “document to slideshow” tool, which is used in group meetings and defenses, which pays more attention to content and the speed of making slides, rather than focusing on design. Not on a grand occasion.
Dialect issues with Markdown
Every time a Markdown software appears, the most unavoidable topic is the dialect of Markdown. Since the native Markdown supports very few formats, many editors have extended the syntax on the basis of Markdown, such as Ulysses’ Markdown XL, which belong to the “dialect” of Markdown. It’s just that some dialects have a high degree of acceptance and gradually become mainstream, such as Github’s GitHub Flavored Markdown.
iA Pre is no exception, it divides the formatting of Markdown into different sections, one section can only be used in handouts and the other section can be displayed in slides. But formats such as bold, italics, bulletins, codes, tables, etc. can be used in both handouts and slides.
About the *.iapresenter format
As mentioned above, the file format used by iA Pre is the proprietary *.iapresenter , not the two general Makrdown file formats *.md and *.markdown . The main thing is that in addition to editing text, iA Pre also needs to store pictures or video files, and mark parameters such as the theme used by the slideshow.
But in fact *.iapresenter not a closed format, you can directly browse the content of *.iapresenter file by using the “View Package Contents” function of Mac.
*.iapresenter file package content
As you can see, the *.iapresenter file is actually a file package consisting of text content, configuration files, and resource files such as pictures and videos.
About the easter eggs seen after exporting HTML
After exporting the slideshow to HTML in iA Pre, you can see the following information in the exported main.css file.
/** * reveal.js * http://revealjs.com * MIT licensed * * Copyright (C) Hakim El Hattab, https://hakim.se */That’s right, the file exported by iA Pre is a page powered by reveal.js. That said, iA Pre is actually a decent Markdown editor, plus a graphical reveal.js generator.
Summarize
Overall, iA Pre gives us a new and more visual tool for making slideshows with Markdown. Compared with reveal.js, handwritten Markdown is definitely a more convenient choice than handwritten HTML. Compared with Obsidian, iA Pre is much more refined and beautiful.
It is true that the iA Pre at this stage is still not as good as professional slideshow production tools such as PPT and Keynote, but when it is necessary to quickly create a slideshow, iA Pre provides us with a more elegant solution than other document tools.
This article is reproduced from: https://sspai.com/post/76540
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