Parade is an open source presentation software that consists of a Sinatra web app that serves up markdown files in a presentation format. Parade can serve a directory or be configured to run with a simple configuration file.

Comparison Vs PowerPoint / Keynote

Parade is easily out-done by professional presentation software packages as far as out-of-the-box style and design. However, there are benefits that Parade has over presentational software:

Highlights

• Markdown backed data

  This ultimately makes it easier to manage diffs when making changes, using the content in other documents, and quickly re-using portions of a presentation.

• Syntax Highlighting

  Using GitHub flavored markdown, code fences will automatically be syntax highlighted, making it incredibly easy to integrate code samples.

• Code Execution

  Slides are able to provide execution and show results for JavaScript and Coffeescript live within the browser. This allows for live demonstrations of code.

• Web

  Slide presentations are basically websites -- they run in your browser from your desktop. This allows for a wide range of possibilities for customization and expandability.

• Basic Templating and Color Schemes

  Several templates and color scheme options have been provided to help you get started. While Parade does not currently provide anything near the variety of many other presentation packages, it is well-suited for basic presentations.

• Design Flexibility (pros and cons)

  Unless you're skilled in CSS/Animations, you will likely have a harder time creating presentations with as much polish as other programs provide. However, this approach also makes Parade incredibly flexible if you do understand CSS/Animations.

Works In Progress

• Resizing

  Currently, the presentation system can change gradual sizes, but does not have true full screen mode.

Installation and Usage

$ gem install parade

Starting the Slide Show

$ parade

By default, running parade starts a presentation from the current working directory. It finds all markdown files, **/*.md, within the directory and creates a presentation out of them.

By default parade will split slides along lines that start with a single #

Slide Show Commands

You can manage the presentation with the following keys:

space or cursor right or cursor down

Advance to the next slide or advance the next incremental bullet point or show the end result of the code execution.

shift-space or cursor left or cursor up

Move to the previous slide

h or ?

Toggle help

f

Toggle footer (which shows slide count of total slides, percentage)

c or t

Toggle the display of the Table of Contents

Visit "http://localhost:9090/print"

Visiting this URL will generate a single page presentation that is printable

Serving a specific directory

$ parade [directory]

This will start a presentation from the specified directory, finding all markdown files contained within the directories or sub-directories.

Serving specific files

To include certain files, specify an order, or duplicate slides, you will need to define a parade file. Within that file, you may define specific files, specific folders, and the order of the presentation.

title "My Presentation"
slides "intro.md"
section "directory_name"

slides and section are exactly the same. However, you may choose to use one over the other depending on if you are mentioning a specific file of slides or a directory which could contain another parade or be considered a section.

You can also define sub-sections with a title and slides or additional sections.

title "My Presentation"

section "Introduction" do
  slides "intro.md"
end

section "Code Samples" do
  slides "ruby"
  slides "javascript"
  section "coffeescript"
end

Slide Format

Slide Separators

Separator: #

Slides are simply markdown format. Slides will be separated along the #elements within your document.

Separator: !SLIDE

Relying on the # as a separator is not always ideal. Alternatively, you can use the !SLIDE separator. This also provides you with the ability to define additional metadata with your slides and presentation.

!SLIDE

# My Presentation

!SLIDE bullets incremental transition=fade

# Bullet Points

* first point
* second point
* third point

Using this separator will immediately override #, so you will have to insert !SLIDE separators in all places you would like cut your slides.

Notes

You can define special notes that are shown in presenter mode.

Presenter mode has been removed until it can be rebuilt

Add a line that starts with .notes:

## Important Slide

* First Thing
* Second Things

.notes The reason that the second thing came about is because things changed.

In this example, the HTML output will contain a <p class='notes'> Toggle presenter notes with the n key while in the presentation.

Presenter mode has been removed until it can be rebuilt

Metadata

HTML IDs

!SLIDE #slide-id-1

In this example the id of the slide div would be set to #slide-id-1

You can define an ID that will be added to the slide's div. This id will be set to any value prefaced with the # character.

Transitions

!SLIDE transition=fade

In this example, the slide will fade when it is viewed. This will set data-transition='fade' on the slides's div.

You can define transitions from the available body of transitions.

The transitions are provided by jQuery Cycle plugin. See http://www.malsup.com/jquery/cycle/browser.html to view the effects and http://www.malsup.com/jquery/cycle/adv2.html for how to add custom effects.

Available Transitions

• none (this is the default)
• blindX, blindY, blindZ
• cover
• curtainX, curtainY
• fade
• fadeZoom
• growX, growY
• scrollUp, scrollDown, scrollLeft, scrollRight
• scrollHorz, scrollVert
• shuffle
• slideX, slideY
• toss
• turnUp, turnDown, turnLeft, turnRight
• uncover
• wipe
• zoom

CSS Classes

!SLIDE bullets incremental my-custom-css-class

In this example, this will add custom css classes to the slide's div will display the following classes: class='content bullets incremental my-custom-css-class'. Note: the content class is added by the default slide template.

All remaining single terms are added as css classes to the slide's div.

Defined Classes

Parade defines a number of special CSS classes:

title

places the content closer to the center of the page

center

centers images on a slide

title-and-content

places the title at the top and the content is left-aligned below it.

section-header

similar to a title class except it is a litle further down the page.

bullets

sizes and separates bullets properly (fits up to 5, generally)

columns / comparison

creates columns for every ## markdown element in your slides (up to 4)

smbullets

sizes and separates more bullets (smaller, closer together)

command

monospaces h1 title slides

commandline

for pasted commandline sections (needs leading '$' for commands, then output on subsequent lines)

incremental

can be used with 'bullets' and 'commandline' styles, will incrementally update elements on arrow key rather than switch slides

text-size-(percentage)

make all slide text size from 70% up to 150%, by percent increments of ten. E.G.: text-size-150, text-size-120, text-size-90, text-size-70.

execute

on Javascript and Coffeescript highlighted code slides, you can click on the code to execute it and display the results on the slide

blank

a slide without content is removed unless you specify that the slide is blank.

Presentation Customization

Themes

Parade comes with a set of themes which can be enabled in your parade file:

title "My Presentation"

theme "hack"

section "Introduction" do
  slides "intro.md"
end

Available Themes

• archetect
• hack
• hayfield
• merlot
• minimal
• slate

Customized Footer

The presentation has the following default footer:

<div id="footer">
  <span id="slideInfo"></span>
  <span id="debugInfo"></span>
  <span id="notesInfo"></span>
</div>

You can override the default footer of the presentation by specifying a file path to a customized footer.

title "My Presentation"

footer "custom_footer.erb"

section "Introduction" do
  slides "intro.md"
end

This example will load a file named customer_footer.erb within your presentation directory.

Loading Custom CSS and JavaScript

By default Parade will load most CSS and JavaScript it finds within the the directory which parade was launched, the current working directory.

You may however also specify a single resource folder or multiple resource folders which parade will load instead of the current working directory.

title "My Presentation"

theme "hack"
resources "scripts"
resources "stylesheets"

section "Introduction" do
  slides "intro.md"
end

The following will look for a folder named scripts and a folder named stylesheets relative to the current working directory and load all the CSS and JavaScript files found within those directories.

Custom JavaScript

To insert custom JavaScript into your presentation you can either place it into a file (with extension .js) into the root directory of your presentation or you can embed a script element directly into your slides. This JavaScript will be executed—as usually—as soon as it is loaded.

If you want to trigger some JavaScript as soon as a certain page is shown or when you switch to the next or previous slide, you can bind a callback to a custom event:

Appearance

• parade:willAppear

triggered before the slide is presented

• parade:didAppear

triggered after the slide is presented

• parade:show

Disappearance

triggered after the slide is presented

• parade:willDisappear

triggered before the slide disappears

• parade:didDisappear

triggered after the slide disppeared

Navigation

• parade:next

triggered when an attempt to move to the next slide or incremental bullet point

• parade:prev

triggered when an attempt to move back a slide or incremental bullet point

These events are triggered on the "div.content" child of the slide, so you must add a custom and unique class to your SLIDE to identify it:

!SLIDE custom_and_unique_class
# 1st Example h1
<script>
// bind to custom event
$(".custom_and_unique_class").live("parade:show", function (event) {
  // animate the h1
  var h1 = $(event.target).find("h1");
  h1.delay(500)
    .slideUp(300, function () { $(this).css({textDecoration: "line-through"}); })
    .slideDown(300);

    return false;
});
</script>

This will bind an event handler for parade:show to your slide. The h1-element will be animated, as soon as this event is triggered on that slide.

If you bind an event handler to the custom events parade:next or parade:prev, you can prevent the default action (that is switching to the appropriate slide) by returning false:

!SLIDE prevent_default
# 2nd Example h1
<script>
$(".prevent_default").live("parade:next", function (event) {
  var h1 = $(event.target).find("h1");
  if (h1.css("text-decoration") === "none") {
    h1.css({textDecoration: "line-through"})
    return false;
  }
});
</script>

This will bind an event handler for parade:next to your slide. When you press the right arrow key the first time, the h1-element will be decorated. When you press the right arrow key another time, you will switch to the next slide.

The same applies to the parade:prev event, of course.

Custom Stylesheets

To insert custom Stylesheets into your presentation you can either place it into a file (with extension .css) into the root directory of your presentation or you can embed a link element directly into your slides. This stylesheet will be applied as soon as it is loaded.

The content generated by the slide is wrapped with a div with the class .+content+ like this.

<div class="content">
<h1>jQuery &amp; Sinatra</h1>
<h2>A Classy Combination</h2>
</div>

This makes the .content tag a perfect place to add additional styling if that is your preference. An example of adding some styling is here.

.content {
  color: black;
  font-family: helvetica, arial;
}
h1, h2 {
  color: rgb(79, 180, 226);
  font-family: Georgia;
}
.content::after {
  position: absolute;
  right: 120px;
  bottom: 120px;
  content: url(jay_small.png);
}

Note that the example above uses CSS3 styling with ::after and the content -attribute to add an image to the slides.

Command Line Interface

parade command_name [command-specific options] [--] arguments...

• Use the command help to get a summary of commands
• Use the command help command_name to get a help for command_name
• Use -- to stop command line argument processing; useful if your arguments have dashes in them

parade help [command]

Shows list of commands or help for one command

parade generate presentation

Create new parade presentation

This command helps start a new parade presentation by setting up the proper directory structure for you. It takes the directory name you would like Parade to create for you.

Options

dir:"directory_name" - the name of the directory you want to generate the presentation (defaults to presentation)

title:"Presentation Title" - the title of the presentation

description:"Presentation Description" - a description of the presentation

Example

description:"Descrip"```

## parade generate outline

Create new parade outline file

Within the existing directory create a **parade** file that contains some
sample sections and slide references to get you started with creating
your customized presentation.

> ### Options
>
> title:"Presentation Title" - the title of the presentation
>
> description:"Presentation Description" - a description of the presentation
>
> outline:"custom outline filename" - if you want to specify a custom outline
>   filename (i.e. override the default **parade** filename).

## parade generate rackup

Create new rackup file

Within the existing directory create a **config.ru** file that contains the
default code necessary to serve this code on Heroku and other destinations.

## parade server

Serves the parade presentation in the current directory

> ### Options
>
> These options are specified *after* the command.
>
> *-f, --file=arg* Presentation file (default: *parade*)
>
> *-h, --host=arg* Host or IP to serve on (default *localhost*)
>
> *-p, --port=arg* The port to serve one (default: *9090*)
>
> ### Aliases
>
> parade s
>
> parade serve

## parade static html [path/to/parade/file]

Generates a static html representation of the presentation.

> ### Options
>
> These options are specified *after* the command.
>
> *-o, --output=file* Presentation output file

## parade static pdf [path/to/parade/file]

Generates a pdf representation of the presentation.

> ### Options
>
> These options are specified *after* the command.
>
> *-o, --output=file* Presentation output file

# Future Plans

## Presenter Tools

* Elapsed / Remaining Timer
* Drawing mode over the slides (Madden-style via canvas)
* Highlighting (highlight region of slide / click to highlight)

## Presentation Layout

* More Themes
* Key-Frame Animations
* Better slide resizing

## Interaction

* questions / comments system
* audience vote-based presentation builder, results live view
* show audience questions / comments (twitter or direct)
* let audience members vote on sections (?)