Friday bonus: Slide decks

Partially out of a desire to be efficient and nimble, partially out of spite (more on that in a longer essay another day), a year or so ago I developed a simple, light-weight pipeline for generating text-only slide decks.

I do it like this: I have a bash script called "textToImages.sh" which looks at a file called "list.txt" and grabs text from it. In list.txt, each line of text is a new slide. The bash script is incredibly jank, because I'm not very accomplished at bash scripting. But it does what matters: it passes information about not only the text-file it's parsing, but also about the qualities of the image I want to generate, to ImageMagick. ImageMagick then creates the files, all nicely and sequentially numbered. Changes to the slide deck are simple – I either change the content in list.txt, or change the visual elements which are covered in textToImages.sh. Then I run the command again and have a fresh slide deck.

More sophisticated tools exist to do this kind of thing. And my method has some serious limitations. But I personally love its simplicity and reliability. Up to the moment I need to present (or need to hand over my slide deck, at least), I can change the whole thing just by re-running the script. It brings me an odd kind of joy to have this small, unsophisticated script leveraging a beloved, old command-line image generation and manipulation tool, to make simple slides that can be changed at my smallest whim, as long as all that's needed is text on a solid-coloured background. (This is, of course, an over-simplification. Because I end up with a set of numbered images, I can also throw additional elements into the deck by numbering them appropriately. So if I want a big photo between slides one and two, I chuck the file into the folder, give it a name like 1a.png, and life is good.)