Manim Slides Survey & Results

[jeertmans]

Hi all!

Until January 31st of 2025, you can fill the Manim Slides Survey to help improve this tool!

Results will be communicated in this thread shortly after the survey is closed.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: the survey is now closed and results are available here. We have received 21 replies in total, and I would like to thank all the people who took some minutes of their time to answer that survey!

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My comments to some of your replies:

First questions

I was actually expecting Reddit to have an important share of the replies, but I am also positively surprised to see other non-obvious replies, like from the JOSE paper I wrote some time ago.

I am happy some people that haven't used Manim Slides had actually clicked on the survey. Hopefully, they were curious enough to give it a try after that :-)

Your experience with Manim Slides

I am a bit surprised that Pip remains so much popular, but it does the job, and I guess some replies imply the use of a self-activated virtual environment.

The replies are relatively positive, and I am happy to see that installing Manim Slides seems to be an easy experience overall, especially as I did not receive any comment on that point.

Teaching and research purposes are the main use cases for Manim Slides, which is also why I use this tool, so this makes sense we observe that results. If you have other use cases for Manim Slides that aren't listed here, please share it with me! :-)

I agree that the HTML presenter is probably the most convenient, especially as it is cross-platform and portable, and requires no specific software (except for a web browser, that everybody has). I actually use the Qt presenter less and less, as support for Qt bindings is a bit hazardous...

I am happy to see that people don't know (or don't care) what Qt bindings they are using, which probably means that everything works fine for them by default.

ManimCE seems to be the main Manim bindings, which makes sense given the lack of documentation for ManimGL, and also the amount of breaking changes introduced by each version makes it very hard for me to provide compatibility with more than one version of ManimGL.

and

Linux is an easier solution for programming, and the above pictures reflect that. People prefer to use Linux for rendering, but Windows (I guess the default OS for many people) for presenting. It also makes more sense to use Windows when presenting with PowerPoint.

• What do you like about Manim Slides?

I prefer python and manim over beamer. I do not have PowerPoint installed

I personally dislike that PowerPoint is so widespread that almost everybody assumes your slides are going to be done with PowerPoint, while this is not available on Linux, you must pay for it, and it is not compatible with versioning tools like Git. I believe Manim Slides is a more interactive alternative to LaTeX-only presentations.

Multiple Output Format

I am happy to read that other people like this feature of Manim Slides. If you see any other meaningful output format, feel free to reach out!

• What do you dislike about Manim Slides?

Can’t seem to find a good way to iterate on animations. Might be a manim problem in general. But currently use notebook cells to do it, but running takes a long time as things get bigger

I see this can be a problem for most. This, and the fact that you must render slides before seeing changes, makes generating slides with Manim Slides a relatively long process. However, I feel one can optimize its setup, like I do, and generate slides at relatively fast pace. I am planning to write a blog post about my tips to write Manim Slides more efficiently.

I would like the command to next slide and similar to be shorter.

If you are talking about next_slide, then you can always create an alias. E.g.,

class Main(Slide):
    ns = Slide.next_slide

    def construct(self):
        self.ns()

It makes collaboration and file sharing with other teachers more difficult.

It's true. You can always share a Git repository, but surely there is no nice web interface that allows multiple editors. You could probably import the HTML slides into slides.com, and edit them there, but you lose the ability to modify the code for generating animations.

Lack of features - conversion to power point the transition between slides is not smooth

I am not sure to see the issue, but the smoothness when changing depends on PowerPoint and your hardware. The more powerful, the less you observe some transition glitches. If that's still an issue, please report on GitHub!

Add toggle full screen button, stop watch and clock option during html conversion

RevealJS (used in the HTML format) provides full-screen mode (press F) as well as a speaker mode (press S) with a clock timer integrated. If that is not what you are looking for, please raise an issue.

Also we cannot add external videos directly in our slides. Please make some function so that we can add an external video directly in our html file

Done with #526.

The compromise needed when working on windows when some advanced features only exists on Linux.

What features only exist on Linux? Please let me know.

Like using manim it takes a lot effort for a simple slideshow

Yes, but I believe that the more you use Manim Slides (and Manim), the easier it becomes to generate slides. Still, nothing can beat PowerPoint (or equivalent) if you just need simple slides with text and images only.

Hard to display videos with

See #526. Otherwise, you can always include a video frame-by-frame using the ImageMobject class. I was working on a VideoMobject class (ManimCommunity/manim#3496), but this is not merged yet.

Additional resources

Users seem relatively happy with the documentation, but suggest more examples (e.g., how to concatenate multiple scenes into one HTML) could be added.

I am happy to see that most replies indicate that GitHub is used as a reference when looking for help. Reddit and Discord also play an important role. It is however important to note that I don't frequently look on Reddit and (especially) Discord, and I prefer that issues are posted on GitHub, as it is easier for me to keep track of them.

At least one person has used my template :'-)

I felt that Manim Slides missed a ready-to-go demonstrator, and this is why I build on ManimCE's Binder to create an interactive environment to use Manim Slides. However, I recently noticed that the Binder image was broken (see #519) and I couldn't understand why yet.

The future of Manim Slides: v6.

Interestingly, audio in slides seems less important to my community than I thought. But it also makes sense as including audio within presentations is not very common neither. This is something I want to do for my public PhD thesis presentation, so I will continue to work on ManimCommunity/manim#3763 sooner or later :-)

This feature should have been improved with #439.

Relatively even distribution of opinions, but this can of feature shouldn't affect the community too much anyway :-)