Revelation

revelation is a cli tool that makes your revealjs presentations nice and easy using markdown and serving it locally.

Features

• Presentation server to run it locally when you are offline.
• Presentation creation from template with a single command.
• Custom theming support with css.
• Export to static html tool.
• Debug mode with server auto refresh.
• Configurable Revealjs plugins

Installation

You can install it with uv:

uv tool install revelation

Or with pipx:

pipx install revelation

And you can also install it with regular pip:

pip install revelation

Usage

Install/Update revealjs files

Revelation depends on revealjs to run its presentation and every command bellow will check and install it if revealjs isn't installed yet.

But, you can also manually install or even update it to a different version with the installreveal command:

revelation installreveal

The files will be placed into the home directory in .local/share/revelation/static. There you can add additional plugins for revealjs.

Creating a new Presentation

To create a new presentation you can use mkpresentation command that will setup a new presentation using the base layout for you:

revelation mkpresentation mypresentation

Running the Presentation

You can start presenting with the start command on your presentation markdown file:

cd mypresentation
revelation start slides.md

Static Export

To export the presentation as static HTML content use the command:

revelation mkstatic slides.md

PDF Export

Presentations can be exported to PDF via a special print stylesheet. This feature will be described using Google Chrome or Chromium, but I got the same results using Firefox.

1. Run the presentation with revelation.
2. Open your browser with the print-pdf as query string like : localhost:5000/?print-pdf.
3. Open the in-browser print dialog (CTRL+P or CMD+P).
4. Change the Destination setting to Save as PDF.
5. Change the Layout to Landscape.
6. Change the Margins to None.
7. Enable the Background graphics option.
8. Click Save.

Alternatively you can use the decktape project.

Presentation Setup

The base presentation file structure looks like this:

presentation/
|- media/
|- theme/
|- config.py
|- slides.md

The slides.md File

This is your presentation file written using markdown with some especial tags described on markdown section and is placed on your presentation root folder.

Split your slides by setting up a slide separator and vertical slide separator into REVEAL_CONFIG. Default separator are --- and ---~.

The media folder

By default, revelation looks for a folder called media inside your presentation root folder. All media placed inside it can be referenced on your presentation by the path /media:

![Python Logo](media/python.png)

You can define a custom media path using the --media option on revelation start command.

The theme folder

You can create your custom theme file and place it inside a theme folder and reference it at the configuration file by the option --theme.

The config.py File

The configuration file located in the root folder of your presentation, allows you to customize your presentation. This file is optional and have the following configuration options:

• REVEAL_META: Metadata of your presentation, mostly to identify the author and title.
• REVEAL_THEME: A string where you can select the theme you would like to use. All revealjs base themes are available.
• REVEAL_CONFIG: A python dictionary with the revealjs configuration attributes but using python types (e.g.: true is python boolean True)
• REVEAL_PLUGINS: A list of dictonaries with optional fields
  • initialize_as: String used for Reveal.initialize in plugins field. Typical Reveal<Plugin name>.
  • initialize_with: Dictionary appended on directonary fo Reveal.initialize.
  • scripts: List of JavaScript files pointing to the revealjs plugin directory.
  • styles: List of CSS files pointing to the revealjs plugin directory.

Once you create a new presentation, all configuration values will be there for you to customize.

Configure plugins

When creating a new presentation with revelation mkpresentation the config.py contains a list with preconfigured plugins in REVEAL_PLUGINS.

For example to enable the charts you must do the following steps:

• Download the charts plugin files
• Download charts.js
• Create a plugin folder in the static directory of revelation (.local/share/revelation/static/revealjs/plugin)
• Add the following entry in the REVEAL_PLUGINS dictionary in your config.py

"Chart": {
    "scripts": [
        "chart/chart.js",
        "chart/plugin.js",
    ],
    "initialize_as": "RevealChart",
    "initialize_with": {
        "chart": {
            "defaults": {
                "color": "green"
            },
        },
    },
}

Markdown

The markdown used on the presentation files support everything that revealjs docs allows to place inside the data-template section.