slipshow vs. html vs css #165
Description
Slipshow provides a nice markdown syntax for creating presentations. This is crucial for reducing the friction when creating content. However at some point the desire to add more styling to the presentation comes up inevitably
- colors for text
- resizing figures or other elements, scaling their contents or cropping the borders
- placing elements in rectangular grids with configurable column and row spacing and alignment
- others?
All of these can be done already, by using a combination of application of css styles, markdown tables, and html. However, a typical user of slipshow has to finish a presentation, and has no time to acquire the necessary html and css knowledge, and knowledge of how to interleave these layers in a slipshow presentation. (Happened to me)
To remedy this, it would go a long way to include minimal examples of how these basic styling operations can be done, right in the documentation.
I tried to learn from a presentation about slipshow linked from the docs, but that was three steps too advanced to be effective for getting things done. I also tried googling for css crash courses, but that was a little too far from the actual use case to be immediately productive.
I believe slipshow should not strive to become 'like powerpoint', where you graphically arrange elements on the screen. This is incompatible with the text-oriented way of creating presentations. But simply a stream of lines and text boxes arranged vertically is too little. There is a sweet spot at an intermediate level of graphical arrangement, in terms of grids or flexboxes, etc.
The user of slipshow should be enabled to do this basic styling without prior html/css knowledge, and I think targeted examples can already achieve 95% of this goal.