Visualizing Text - Slider

Goal: Lightweight Text Visualization

Like markdown for slides, but, less ad-hoc than markdown",

We want the 'good parts' of heavyweights like Powerpoint and Keynote, without the bloat.

KISS

Expected benefits

• beyond just making presentations...
• lightweight text visualizer gives instant feedback (like a REPL)
  • you can instantly "see" if your description looks "complicated" vs "easy to understand"
• a lightweight, point-form visualizer for text might be used to create
  • README.mds
  • high-level documentation in general
  • elevator pitches

Screenshots

Video

Writing Text From Scratch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUQbCEmiWVk

Accessing via URL - https://youtu.be/nZ4aW_LIsdw

Install, Use

• no installation necessary
• open a browser on https://guitarvydas.github.io/slider/ for the default
• or, drop a full presentation URL into a browser
• code repo at https://github.com/guitarvydas/slider

Closing Thoughts

Code Size

Lines of Code (baseline project)

• Grammar: 12 lines
• Actions: 15 lines
• Mithril: 66 lines
• <100 lines for baseline

Portability

• very portable
• all presentation data is contained in the URL
• load a presentation URL into a browser -> instant slider

Inspiration

• Chuck Moore Forth editor
• flems.io (URL encoded link)
• Keynote (Apple)

Did It Turn Out Like We'd Hoped?

What Did We Learn?

• don't need WYSIWYG, stand-beside visualizer is good enough
• learned about writing Grammars and Actions (Ohm-JS, PEG)
  • no need to hand-craft parsers or use YACC ever again (thanks to PEG concepts)
• grammars can be used in more apps than just being used for writing compilers
  • Ohm-JS is like REGEX on steroids
• learned about writing HTML in a lightweight manner (Mithril)
• Ohm-JS + Mithril - result in quick, small web apps

Future

Team

• J. Fuller (oofoe)
• Paul Tarvydas (paultarvydas)