hieroglyph: Easy, Beautiful Slides with Restructured Text

I was happy to have my talk proposal accepted for PyCon this year, and happy with the feedback I received on my talk (Django Forms Deep Dive). But as I was putting my talk together the distracting question was not, “what should I say”, but “what should I say it with”. As a mentor once pointed out, “it’s more fun to write programs to help you write programs than it is to write programs.” The corollary I found over the past couple weeks: “it’s more fun to write programs to help you write slides than it is to write slides.”

I was putting together notes using reStructured Text and kept thinking that it’d be nice to generate both slides and longer written documentation from the same source. I’ve used docutils’ S5 generator in the past, but was looking for something a little more polished looking. Something like the HTML5 Slides.

So I wrote a Hieroglyph, a Sphinx builder for generating HTML5 Slides. I presented hieroglyph at the Sunday morning lightning talks at PyCon: you can see the slides, the reStructured Text source, as well as the HTML documentation generated from the same source.

I’m really happy with the output — it looks great in the browser, projects well, and because I’m using the html5slides CSS, looks great on mobile devices, too. I’m even happier that I’m able to work on my content in plain text. You can find the source on github.