Deckset Auto Preview
Deckset is a great applicaton for creating slide decks on macOS. However, what if you need to edit a presentation while on your phone/tablet or on a different computer running Linux or Windows? Up until now, you would be out of luck.
Deckset Auto Preview (dap) attempts to solve this issue. It monitors a directory tree on your Mac for any changes to markdown presentation files. When it detects a change, it launches Deckset and exports the presentation as a PDF (it actually creates two copies: one with speaker notes and one without). The PDF is then converted to a Keynote '09 presentation using PDF to Keynote Finally, proper Keynote and PowerPoint presentations are created via Keynote. These presentations will include all speaker notes present in the original Deckset presentation.
I will frequently work from my iPhone/iPad. Thanks to iCloud, I always have access to my Deckset presentations. With dap, I can now edit the Markdown in my favoritem mobile editor, wait a minute, and I will have a preview ready to go.
It is quite common to want to provide a presentation in multiple file formats. This is usually done to support easy viewing in various applications. dap will automatically produce Powerpoint and Keynote presentation files, as well as a PDF. This trio of formats should be viewable by most users regardless of platform.
While Deckset provides a very nice presentation interface, it lacks some features that an application like Keynote provides. For example, Keynote supports using an iPhone as a second screen (for viewing speaker notes) and a remote. It also supports presenting directly from an iPhone/iPad without the need for a computer. By using dap to convert your presentation to Keynote, you get to use Deckset for creating your presentation and Keynote for presenting.
The Keynote and Powerpoint presentations are created from the exported PDF files. This means it is not possible to edit the text/images contained in the slides using one of these applications. You must continue to use Deckset for editing.
Deckset is a tool for creating slide decks from mardkwon files. You likely already have it installed if you are looking at dap.
fswatch is used to monitor a directory tree for changes.
This allows quickly re-generating presentation files only when necessary.
You can install it with: brew install fswatch
PDF to Keynote is responsible for converting the PDF file exported from Deckset into a Keynote '09 presentation file.
You can install it with: brew cask install nhandler/tap/pdf-to-keynote
Keynote is used to convert the presentation produced by PDF to Keynote into a modern Keynote presentation that contains speaker notes. It also handles exporting a Powerpoint version of the presentation. This likely came installed on your Mac.
You can install dap with: brew install nhandler/tap/dap
You will need to run sudo brew services start dap following installation to start the launchd service that will run in the background.
By default, dap will monitor ~/Documents/Presentations recursively for any .md files.
This directory can be adjusted with defaults write com.nhandler.dap presentationDirectory -string ~/Documents/Presentations (replace ~/Documents/Presentations with your new path).
Generated PDF/Keynote/Powerpoint files will be created in the same directory as their corresponding markdown file.