Pochani: Turn Markdown into elegant presentations

Pochani is a customizable Command line tool for creating great presentation from Markdown file. You don't need any memory hungry presentation application to create presentation.Simply create a markdown file and convert it to a wonderful presentation with this command line utility. The output presentation is beautiful, independent and full of useful features.

Click here for a demo presentation

Features

Watch this feature video

• Create presentation from markdown file, familiar syntax, fast creation
• Custom Styles and templates
• Responsive by default
• Full touch support
• Draw and annotate on your presentation
• Show webcam feed inside your presentation

Installation

Pochani requires at least node.js 0.12.x, and it can be installed directly with npm, just use the below command as root user:

npm install -g pochani

If you wish to install manually, that's also possible, just clone the Git repository and create a symbolic link to your /usr/local/bin directory with the following code:

git clone https://github.com/theanam/pochani.git
sudo ln -s /location/to/pochani/pochani.js /usr/local/bin/pochani

obviously don't forget to change the location/to/pochani to the folder you've cloned pochani into.

Usage

Preparing the Markdown file:

Pochani uses markdown syntax. if you are not familiar with it, you can learn it I wrote a Bangla article on markdown, you can Check it out if you speak Bangla. You'll be amazed how quickly you can create documents with markdown. In fact, this document is written in Markdown as well.

however you'll have to know one more thing, Pochani uses a special identifier --SLIDE-- at the beginning of each slide.This helps create multiple slides out of a single file. note: it's case sensitive so, --SLIDE-- should be in uppercase . Here's a sample file with three slides:

--SLIDE--
# Hello world
Pochani is nice, and fast
--SLIDE--
# The Slide has a list
* List element one
* List element two
* List element three
--SLIDE--
Did you notice we just created three slides with just a few lines of text?
Isn't it awesome?
--SLIDE--
# Thanks for using Pochani
happy that it helped

make sure that the identifier --SLIDE-- is on a single line.

Save the file with .md or .markdown format. both are supported, let's say you saved it as mypresentation.md

Converting to presentation

Go to the folder where your file is located, and run this command:

pochani mypresentation.md
 

This will copy all the necessary files and convert your file into a nice presentation. the filename should be mypresentation.md.html. The res folder contains all the necessary libraries and files, put them and the file in a server then open it in your browser and start presenting it. You can directly double click and open the file to present it, but for security reasons, Video won't work. you can use the http-server npm package to serve the file from the same directory. just use npm install -g http-server and once it's installed run http-server command inside the presentation folder, and navigate to http://localhost:8080

I'm working on a integrated server with support for remote control for a future release.

Using custom templates

Pochani comes with a default template. But the main power is with you. You can Create your own very easily. just download the base template file (template.css) from here edit it, and then use the filename as an extra parameter while converting. Like this:

pochani filename.md mytheme.css

And it will use styles from this file, rather than the default file.

Browser Support

• All latest firefox,and chrome browsers
• Microsoft Egde 12+
• Apple Safari 8+ (Video not supported yet)
• Internet Explorer! 9+ (partially supported)
• Opera 32+
• Android Browser 4.1+ (Video maybe not supported for some versions or smaller screens)