Aspirational & Useful: deck.rb with RStudio/knitr & Go2Shell

There has been some interest in the recent release of RStudio 0.96 and especially the ability to use combine its knitr Markdown functionality with Pandoc to integrate R and a variety of different documents types.

I just wanted to add two quick things (one mostly aspirational, the other useful)

Aspirational: Markdown/Ruby/deck.js

I am currently using this combination to put together a presentation based on a recent working paper. Maybe out of procrastination I decided to see if there was any way to use knitr/Markdown to write a deck.js presentation. I generally prefer deck.js to the three Pandoc HTML presentation types (slidy, S5, and dzslides).

Deck.js presentations are a pain to write, so it would be great if there was a program like Pandoc that could quickly convert a Markdown file into a deck.js presentation.

I discovered that there kind of is. There is a ruby program called deck.rb. The Markdown syntax is really simple and would be familiar to Pandoc users (individual slides are demarcated with the first level header #).

After you install deck.rb in the terminal with the usual:

sudo gem install deckrb

you can easily build presentations in the command line with:

deck myPresentation.md

However, I’ve classified this as aspirational since it lacks a lot of functionality that Pandoc has, including:

• There really aren’t title slides.

• The slideshow opens as a locally hosted webserver, and the command to build a stand alone HTML presentation doesn’t seem to work that well (hence no example included with this post).

• It only allows you to use the Swiss template.

• I couldn’t figure out how to easily get MathJax support to display equations.

Maybe I won’t use use deck.rb for this presentation, but I will keep an eye on any developments.

Useful Tip: Command Line/Go2Shell

Since I’m on about the terminal and command line, I thought I might mention a small (free) program that is very helpful: Go2Shell. It is a little Mac application that only opens a new terminal window from the folder that you currently have open.

Very useful for easily setting your terminal working directory when, for example, making Pandoc presentations.