Lightweight presentations out of any web page

You want to give a presentation. But you also want the material to be available in a plain reading format. In fact, you want to target the "looks good when read" rather than the presentation mode. And you want the minimum work.

This extension transforms any HTML page into an presentation by hiding unnecessary elements, increasing space between the sections, and adding a direct scroll (using left and right arrow keys) between sections.

Right now it is distributed as a Sphinx documentation generator extension since that's how the authors use it, but minipres.js should be usable by others.

Examples:

• minipres mode, vs normal page, vs plain mode. In minipres mode, try pushing left and right arrow keys.

Sphinx extension usage

Install:

pip install sphinx-minipres

Add to extensions:

extensions = [
  'sphinx_ext_minipres',
]

In any rendered page:

• Add ?pres to the URL to go into slideshow mode
• Add ?plain to go into "plain" mode - no scrolling, but remove unnecessary elements from the page (most useful for sphinx_rtd_theme)
• Add &h=3 (or so on) to the URL to select the highest (or lowest actually) heading to use as each section

In the slideshow mode, you can use the left and right arrow keys to navigate.

Independent usage

The sphinx extension simply copies minipres.js to the build and includes it - there is not much Sphinx specific here.

On an unrelated website with it hard coded, minipres can be loaded dynamically from the browser console x = $.getScript('/path/to/minipres.js') and then started with minipres()

Development status

Alpha and works. However, it needs to be adapted to work for each theme/page style, which will limit its usefulness. Currently removes unneeded elements on sphinx_rtd_theme but the core scrolling probably works on others.

See also

Please let me know if you know of other tools such as this.