Marp!

Robert W. Gehl, 01 December 2024

As avid readers of my blog know, I am livin' the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream: I use FOSS tools to do my academic work. I use Nextcloud to manage files and handle appointments, Zotero and Zettlr to take notes, and LibreOffice Writer to write books and articles. This blog runs on Jekyll. I love it all!

But there has been one part of the Lifestyle that has consistently been a disappointment: LibreOffice Impress, the presentation software. While I use Writer all the time and enjoy doing so, Impress has always bothered me. But I'm not one to complain too much, since LibreOffice software is provided free-of-charge and with a FOSS license. I've soldiered on with it to make presentations for conferences and class teaching.

But that might change. Marp -- the Markdown Presentation Ecosystem -- is poised to become a key part of the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream. If you're familiar with Markdown, Marp is a really awesome tool.

Thank you, Linux Matters

I learned about Marp from the Linux Matters podcast. Like any good podcast episode, their discussion of Marp made me drop everything to learn more. As Mark on Linux Matters explained, Marp allows for presentations to be built very quickly using Markdown. Since I use Markdown regularly to write up notes, particularly for class lectures, I was intrigued.

And when I started experimenting with Marp, I think Mark might have undersold it a bit!

Markdown: It's That Easy

So, let's make a slide. Instead of firing up LibreOffice Impress, though, I just open a text editor a create a Markdown (.md) file.

First, I add "frontmatter," which tells the system how to handle the file:

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Post Tags

• Goal 1
• FALD
• Marp