OCaml Weekly News

The main improvements of this version are the introduction of arguments to actions, a frontmatter, and improvements to slides.

All together, they allow to easily design presentations the slides way:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/844754a7-7731-45a8-8cc5-97a315d5cd92

---
toplevel-attributes: {children:slide children:enter="~duration:0"}
---

# Slide 1

Content

---

# Slide 2

Content

---

# Slide 3

You get it

So, why “​bitter joy”?

I was reluctant to add good support for traditional slide-based presentation. There are already very good and mature solutions for this, including some with similar technical foundations as Slipshow. I was more interested in developping the new things: Slips!

However, Slipshow starts to have useful features that competitor don’t always have (for instance: a self-contained html output! But more, and more to come). Also, for people who already have slide-based presentations, it makes it easier to migrate them, and use a single tool for old and new presentations!

Finally, I wanted to make Slipshow a bit more versatile and added attributes, frontmatter, and a new options: toplevel-attributes. The proper slide support is actually just a nice consequence of this versatility! 🥳

Here is the full changelog:

• Fix children: not working sometimes
• Add --toplevel-attributes to control the attributes on the toplevel container
• Render slide titles as slide titles
• Add arguments to actions

• Add frontmatter

  You can now do

  ---
  theme: vanier
  dimension: 16:9
  css: my_pres.css
  ---
  
  The content here.
  

In this release, I add the ability to give arguments to actions. For instance, an action can be to focus on a specific element:

{#my_element}
Some content

{focus="my_element"}

The "positional" arguments is the list of IDs that must be focused. To add other kind of arguments , they need to be named:

{#my_element}
Some content

{focus="~duration:2 ~margin:5 my_element"}

It was fun to integrate OCaml syntax in slipshow ;) This way, people coming to OCaml after learning slipshow will feel familiar with the syntax!

As subtly hinted by the title, this slipshow release focuses on the integration of external files in a presentation. Rest assured, a compiled Slipshow presentation stays a standalone HTML file!

In effect, you can now include PDFs, videos and audios files in your presentations! Here is a demo:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/bf7d5933-9b29-4e52-ac2a-c4a9a87d9dc6

With the simple source:

{#title}
# Plan 9 from External Files

{pause play-media=mp4}
## Video demo

![](plan9.mp4){#mp4 style="width:100%"}

{pause up}

## PDF demo

![](plan9.pdf){#pdf}

{focus=pdf}

{change-page="~n:all pdf"}

{unfocus up=title}

Here is the full changelog: