Lately, I have been making my presentation slides with LaTeX beamer. I use SVGs created with inkscape (and my handy wacom tablet) for most diagrams and the minted package (which eventually calls pygments) for syntax highlighted source code listings. This combination works well and produces very nice PDFs that I can present with evince.

Unfortunately, the compile time for a large presentation is excessive and makes incremental updates a bit of a pain. It is also wasteful since I am not using many of the good things that TeX provides (I try to minimize my reliance on bulleted lists and math in slides). Many of my slides are just SVG diagrams converted to PDFs.

I decided that I needed a bit of a change, so for a short presentation I am giving soon I decided to use HTML + Javascript for my slides. I am not a huge fan of web technologies or doing much of anything in a web browser, but if most of my slides are SVGs surrounded by a bit of colored text, that is halfway to a web page anyway. Looking around, I saw a few options:

I remember using s5 once in undergrad. It works but isn't particularly impressive. prezi is really neat, but it requires using some web-based editor and is based on flash, which make it obviously a no-go. impress.js produces very nice results. It takes a different approach from a slide-based presentation; your entire presentation lives in a big poster and the viewport zooms around to different sections, subject to various scaling and rotation transformations. The effect is very slick, but distracts somewhat from the content. I don't think it is particularly suitable for any technical content. It would probably go over well for some kind of sales fluff-piece presentation, though. The additional effort of manually arranging each slide in the plane of the poster is also a bit more than I would want to deal with.

I decided to go with deck.js, which uses a more traditional slide-based scheme. At the end of the day, it really is a lot like LaTeX beamer in your browser. I threw in highlight.js to highlight my source code snippets, and I can directly embed SVG graphics without conversion. I'm very happy with the results, and it doesn't require any fancy LaTeX hackery to safely work with fragile slides. It even has a nice navigation overview that you can bring up with the 'm' key to randomly jump between slides. This setup has the additional advantage of being able to use any HTML-friendly content, including forms, javascript, iframes, and embedded videos without having to switch away from the slide viewer. Styling is also a bit easier with CSS than beamer's lightly-documented internals.

I have to see how it performs at presentation time, but it seems to be perfectly acceptable. Now I have to try it with a more complex presentation.