What is The Presenter

The Presenter is a small hobby-project that I made between making some (actual) presentations. It can be used to transform simple web-content, HTML or Markdown based, into a presentation.

How do I use this?

If you are currently authoring an HTML-presentation, just insert this link in the head of the document, including the type=module attribute:

            <script type="module" src="https://narve.github.io/the-presenter/scripts/present.js"></script>
            

This will start the presentation immediately. You can also add a "Present"-button or make the presentation start conditionally based on a URL parameter.

See this self-contained example (source) for more details and examples, also how to suppress the console output and avoid a flash of unstyled content.

If you have an online markdown-file or an HTML-file you want to present, just enter the URL of that file in the form above, select the presentation mode/framework you want to use, press the "Open The Presenter!" button, and hope that the content is structured in such a way that The Presenter can handle it🙏.

Does it use AI?

Nope. It is rather simple and rule-based.

Will it work for my web page?

• If your content is made for/with/tested in one of the supported presentation frameworks, then yes, probably.
• If your content is structured in a non-crappy way - basically each slide must be a separate section-element (without subsections), then yes, probably🙏. You might have to tune the selectors a bit.
• For a random web page: Probably not.

Does it require a server? Does it work offline?

There is no server involved (except the web server hosting the content, and the webserver hosting this presenter tool). The presentation content is downloaded directly in your browser, transformed, and presented.

It doesn't really work offline, but if you load the presentation tool and start the presentation while online, you can then use it offline. Until you close the tab 😁.

What is this CORS thing?

Sometimes the content you want to present is hosted on a server that does not allow other web pages (like this presenter tool) to download that content. This is a security feature in web browsers called CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing).

If you check the "Allow using a CORS-proxy?" checkbox, The Presenter will try to download the content via a CORS-proxy server. This server will download the content for you, and then send it to your browser with the correct CORS-headers. This is not very secure, as the proxy server will be able to see all the content you are downloading - and also modifying it if it wants to.

So use this feature with care! Also, some corporate networks block access to (some) public CORS-proxy servers, so it may still not work.

Bug reports, pull requests etc?

Sure, feel free to try that. I made this mostly for fun, so I can't promise any quick responses.