This is an article from a series of blog postings. Please do read my "Using Org Mode Features" (UOMF) series page for explanations on articles of this series.

In this article, I will explain a neat method of conducting HTML screen presentations as well as generating the presentation handouts in PDF.

Motivation

Besides using LaTeX beamer for creating presentation slides, there are many other products that help you in creating and conducting slide presentations with Org mode. In my business life, I had to create and maintain presentations as well as associated PDF handouts: process definitions, security guidelines, teaching material, and so forth.

Usually, people tend to create slide decks using Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress while having a separate document with the handout that offers much more content compared to the slide deck content.

Instead of having two separate documents, using one single Org mode heading sub-hierarchy that results in a slide deck and a PDF handout does come with many advantages.

The content is never out of sync.

You get rid of duplicating content for the two resulting documents.

Committing to a (local) Git repository gives you the full range of functionality related to version management.

Further more, it's easier to collaborate on the content with peers.

My Setup

I chose to generate reveal HTML slides which are generated by org-reveal. The handouts are good old PDF documents that are generated via the LaTeX to PDF export of Org mode.

If you are using Word or OpenOffice instead, you might want to read this article related to exports following a company template corporate design. For customizing the LaTeX output, you might want to take a look at my org-latex-classes modifications of my configuration.

In contrast to many other users of Org mode, I tend to keep the number of Org mode files to a minimum. Therefore, the heading for the presentation is within a large Org mode file that contains all kind of other stuff. And this is the reason why I'm only using export settings that can be defined in the drawers of the main heading of the sub-hierarchy to be exported in contrast to "export whole buffer/file".

Example

Here is a short example of a sub-hierarchy that might get exported to HTML using C-c C-e R B or PDF using C-c C-e l o :

** My Cool Presentation About A Topic :PROPERTIES: :EXPORT_OPTIONS: num:t toc:t reveal_keyboard:t reveal_overview:t :EXPORT_REVEAL_HLEVEL: 1 :EXPORT_REVEAL_THEME: white :EXPORT_FILE_NAME: C:/Users/user/path/to/presentation slides -- draft :END: # Comments are not part of the slide deck or the PDF: # Export to HTML/reveal: C-c C-e R B # Export to PDF/pdfLaTeX: C-c C-e l o Welcome to my audience to my great HTML presentation and the PDF handout! #+LATEX: \clearpage # Yes, you are able to add LaTeX commands that # won't disturb the HTML presentation. This is still on slide 1 and in the handout, it's page 2 because of the clearpage command. #+BEGIN_NOTES Content within NOTES blocks is only shown in the PDF export and not in the reveal presentation slide. That's very handy for additional content that is mentioned during the talk but not shown on screen. Attendees are able to read it in the handouts later-on. #+END_NOTES #+ATTR_HTML: :width 30% :height 30% [[file:~/images/awesome_image.jpg]] #+REVEAL: split The split line above here makes sure that this is on a new slide. The command is ignored for PDF export. *** Next Topic [...] *** Topic After the next Topic [...]

I won't go into details about PDF export or reveal. Please refer to the good documentation to learn how to use them.