HTML5 Presentations

After just getting back from the DPG spring meeting, I thought I'd give a overview of how to create (scientific) presentations using HTML5. The talk I gave was setup using jmpress, and it worked out quite beautifully (at least from my perspective).

My experience with WYSIWYG was rather frustrating. While I'm quite sure MS Word is a terrific product, it's use in a Linux dominated environment as theoretical physics seems rather strange. OpenOffice on the other hand fell far off my expectations. Finally, I settled into Latex. However the general complications of embedding videos and the rather long compilation times left me rather frustrated.

So why use HTML5? From my experience it shows a couple of advantages:

  • text based, so it can be edited with any program
  • support for dynamic content, both animations of slide content and easy embedding of videos
  • with mathjax simple support for Latex formulas
  • directly embeddable into a webpage
  • free
  • you can reuse you knowledge of web technologies

The specific choice of jmpress was guided by its ability to create quite impressive animations and slide transitions. However this comes at the cost of an increased learning curve, which is not really balanced by the documentation.

In the next couple of posts I will try introduce you to some of the concepts needed to setup a simple presentation using HTML5.