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 once made an animated presentation using Inkscape and an add-on I can’t remember the name of. It was epic and blown everyone’s mind. But it was not worth the effort and I have never attempted this again.
Which elements do you want in it that you can not find ? Only simple transitions like this or I am sure you have specific issue… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WzigWN_c2g
Lately I’ve been using Sent.
https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-office/
Works like a charme across major platforms and formats.Last time I checked versions for Android and Linux were unpaid.
maybe cryptpad.fr
Marp works well if you like Markdown. I cannot, however, speak to things such as transitions (though marp exports to a nice HTML file which includes a PowerPoint-like interface, so I’d imagine it’s possible).
Another option using Markdown: Slidev
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.
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.
LaTeX with Beamer for slides, and show the resulting PDF on any computer you want
A long time ago I did some things with https://revealjs.com/ but not sure how viable that is.
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:
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.
Typst for presentations? 🧐
I’d go for markdown (html, js) but if I had to choose between tex and typst, I’d get rid of tex as much as possible
https://typst.app/universe/package/touying/
