Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare rides upon sleep, so here I am back fiddling with my computer configuration out of pure escapism. When I prepare slides for class or a talk, I write in markdown, using pandoc to generate the slides via Beamer. Beamer, you say, still? In 2026? Well, what do you want? I read somewhere (Finnegans Wake?) that Vico says people only understand what they themselves have made. I made an elaborate Rube-Goldberg pile of Makefiles, pandoc templates, pandoc Lua filters, hacky LaTeX tweaks, and so on and so forth, and it suits my purposes. I’ve been using it ever for a decade and more, and I keep hacking on it to keep up with whatever changes pandoc updates bring. I hadn’t tidied things up for the public repository in a while. Now I have. I give you, once again, Easy Lecture Slides Made Difficult: available for whatever use on github.com/agoldst/elsmd.
This should work with recent pandoc to generate slides and accompanying speaker notes from a single markdown file, by default in my preferred dark-on-light “scuro” theme.
I haven’t yet updated my R package that uses this for R markdown slides in my preferred style, but I will soon. I certainly have plenty I want to escape from.