MarkSlide Go

This project contains tools to manage a knowledge-base as hierarchicaly structured markdown-files. These files are converted to PDF- or HTML-slide decks using the MARP tool.

References:

• Markdown Presentation Ecosystem MARP Official Site
• Markdown Explorer VS Code Extension

TODO:

• package.json --> fix "themeSet" property to use catalog's _template

Installation

• Create a .env file in the project root. See .env.sample
• Install Node.js
  The Marp-Tool uses NodeJs > v16 which has to be installed prior to execution of the CLI tool.
  Set the path to the npx-executable in the .env file.
• Install the Marp CLI client For a local install use:

  npm install --save-dev @marp-team/marp-cli    

  Check if it works using:

  npx @marp-team/marp-cli@latest -v

• Install Google-Chrome (required for the html-rendering)
• Install the Marp for VS Code extension
• Activate VS Code-Setting: Markdown > Marp: HTML
  to support html-based styling and multi-column slides, see [https://github.com/orgs/marp-team/discussions/192#discussioncomment-1517399]
• Install Tesseract
  Installers see [https://www.baeldung.com/java-ocr-tesseract#setup], Set the path to the tesseract-executable in the .env file.
• Download and install better language files from [https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/tree/main] (just replace the previously installed .traineddata files)
• Install Python (>3.10), create virtual environment (venv) and activate it
• Install the necessary python libraries

  pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Marp-only usage (without MarkSlideGo scripts) to generate slides

• Change to the directory of the Markdown file
• To generate HTML run from there:
  npx marp <filename>.md -o <filename>.html --theme <path-to-_template-dir>/fhtw.css
  Remarks: replace the path to the files you want to generate.
• To generate PDF run:
  npx marp <filename>.md -o <filename>.pdf --theme <path-to-_template-dir>/fhtw.css
  Remarks: replace the path to the files you want to generate.

Automated generation of slides

Use the following scripts to generate the slide-decks in various formats.

Generate a specific slide-deck:

• Change to the directory of the Markdown file
• Generate as PDF (with outlines and notes): python3 generate.py <filename>.md <filename>.pdf
• Generate as HTML (presenter mode): python3 generate.py <filename>.md <filename>.html
• Generate as PPTX (with notes): python3 generate.py <filename>.md <filename>.pptx

Generate all slides:

The scripts will iterate through the catalogs/ and create a slide-deck for every .md-file found there.

• Generate all as PDF (with outlines and notes): python3 generate_all.py
• Generate app as PPTX : python3 generate_all.py pptx

Generate slides per course

see courses/README.md

Full-Text Search the Knowledge-Base

Simply use the search-function of VSCode which effectively will find the files and lines where the search expression fits (like the command line tool grep)

Generate Text/MD out of PDF-Files (with OCR)

It is possible to fill the Knowledge-Base also with PDF-Files. To make them searchable, the contents of the PDFs need to be converted to a (Markdown-based) textfile. Use the pdf2md.py tool to get Markdown text, pdf2text.py to get unformated text. Change to the directory of the PDF-file and run the tool:

~/dev/marp/catalogs/$ python3 pdf2text.py SpringBoot3-Infografik.pdf
~/dev/marp/catalogs/$ python3 pdf2md.py SpringBoot3-Infografik.pdf