Slideshow mode

[danyx23]

Core problem

Authors occasionally want to prepare slideshows - either when they are giving lectures or talks or because they think that a certain topic could be given a nice overview with a few dozen charts and a bit of text.

We have an old slideshow setup in the slides repo using reveal.js but there authors have to write (somewhat elaborate) HTML manually which is not great and stops them from doing it.

Proposed solution

In December 2021 in a tech meeting we discussed two options and decided that it would be good if simple posts (shorts) that adhere to a certain structure could be rearranged client side into slides.

A prototype that uses the current version of reveal.js is currently half-finished in PR #1079 . It hides all content of the normal page and then creates new dom nodes in the format expected by reveal.js, then initializes the reveal slideshow.

The critical blockers before this feature could be tried out on actual content are:

• [ ] Embedded explorers don’t load properly
• [ ] Pressing the “s” key switches back to long form but then all the iframes are messed up
• [ ] Margins/padding looks a bit unbalanced (at least on smaller screens)

Further nice to haves (in order of importance)

• [ ] Titles should not show in all-caps (should adopt the case that the author writes)
• [ ] Improved design: close the visual gap between this format and the rest of our website (changing the background colour and font would make a big difference).
• [ ] With text on the side of the chart, it would be nice if that text was in the centre of the slide, rather than at the top
• [ ] Text is always on the right side of the chart. If the aspect ratio of the screen is a portrait, it should show the text below the chart (usually the case on mobile). (implementation note: this could probably be done with an aspect ratio media query)
• [ ] Related to the one above – On mobile, interactive charts I think should work in the way they do in our current entries: shown as a static png of the embedded view, with a ‘Click to open interactive version’ option. That will make much more space for text (beneath)
• [ ] Support bullet points (currently text in bullets shows very large)
• [ ] Some way of having a second ‘aside’ voice (for noting technical text – e.g. this).

Alternatives

One alternative we discussed is that instead of doing the rearranging of content clientside, we could do it during baking or as another offline process. We decided against this because we were afraid of duplicating content too much and because users might want to be able to switch between slideshow view and post view.

Context

Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

[larsyencken]

Marking this as low priority for now, because with Matt on board we're going to review different formats and publishing options that we want in the future.