Looking for libre altenratives to make presentations
Looking for libre altenratives to make presentations
I moved away from MS Windows a long while back and have ported everything EXCEPT presentations. I still use a friend's laptop just for PowerPoint.
I have used LibreOffice Impress and it is quite poor in design and the templates are very unprofessional.
I have used LaTeX beamer a lot and I am now tired of fighting it to make simple transitions look good, quickly customise a slide, etc.
Are there alternatives that I can use which are libre friendly as well as user-friendly?
I have used reveal.js and presenterm for simple work presentations and I enjoyed working with both. You’ll get a lot more flexibility and features from reveal, but presenterm is neat for certain kinds of presentations too.
https://www.onlyoffice.com/ may be an option. They have hosted plans but you can just use the office suite with local files for free if you don't need a yof the hosted offerings features
It's this or Google or Microsoft if you want something PowerPoint-like.
Many recommend to 'pick a javascript framework', which just like LaTeX Beamer sounds good if you do your own thing, but not ideal if people expect PowerPoint. Building slides through code is fundamentally different from drag-on-dropping images.
Pick Google or Microsoft or OnlyOffice and use their web version. This keeps your laptop free of non-free software while using the same tools everyone else has.
Pandoc with reveal.js is nice. I also use an asciidoc template with asciidoctor-pdf, but it's a pdf output so no fancy animations or transitions.
I have a couple write ups about them:
LaTeX with Beamer for slides, and show the resulting PDF on any computer you want
Personally, I'd just use one of the many good markdown / JS presentation frameworks (reveal.js et. al.) out there, a local HTTP server and a browser.
Typst. Quarto. Xaringan. There's lots of good tools.