3.5 Other Useful Features

Before we wrap things up, I wanna show you two features that I think make Reveal a really awesome presentation framework. And those are speaker notes and PDF Export. So, speaker notes. Reveal uses a plug-in that allows you to use speaker notes in a separate browser window. And using them is really simple. All you have to do is press S on your keyboard. And that's gonna open up another browser window, showing you the following. The current slide, the upcoming slide, the time elapsed from when you opened the speaker notes. And you can also click to reset this, and also the current time, which is very, very useful. Now, there's also a different layout here. So this is the default. You can change it to a wide layout, Tall layout, or you can see the notes only. I think from all of them, I particularly like the wide layout. So what is this useful for? Well, you can have notes show up right here telling you, hey, this is what you have to talk about right now in the current slide. So let's go ahead and add some notes. To do that, you can do it, well actually, in two different ways. The first one is by using an aside inside the section. So aside with the classroom notes, and whatever you put inside is gonna be displayed as a note, just like this. Let's create another aside here. And now, if I open up my speaker notes, you'll see that on my current slide, yeah here it is, slide one, we have notes that we set in slide one. And I can control the presentation from here. Right, I can either click here, and that's gonna go to the next slide. And also, it's gonna show me the notes from slide two. Switching back to slide one, slide two, it's also gonna switch the notes. Really, really cool. Now, there's a second option to add notes. So let's go ahead and create another section here. And let's say Slide 3, and let's do a Slide 4 as well. So that second option is to use a data attribute called data notes on the section element, so you would write your note here. And then, When you get to that third slide, you can see the notes right here. That is pretty cool. Now, there's a lot we can do with notes. You can have server-side speaker notes, where it can have these notes on a separate device from the one you're actually presenting on. You can also do multiplexing, which allows the people watching your presentation to view the slides on their own device. And you can learn more about these options on the official documentation for the framework. For now, the very basic is this one that I just showed you. Now, finally, I wanna talk about PDF Export, because with Reveal, you can export your presentation to PDF, but be careful. You do need to use a web server or local web server to make this happen. So, to export, you would need to add ?print-pdf in the query string in the address bar here, okay? And this will essentially create a page which you can just print using command P. And then, go into PDF, save as PDF like this. And here is the PDF that was generated. Really cool, and of course there are a couple of options here you can choose. You can change the orientation, it's best you go with landscape. Make sure you you click Print Backgrounds. Headers and Footers is not necessarily important, and Paper Size, You can choose from a bunch of different presets. Again, this really depends on your browser, but this is the way to go. One thing to note here is that currently you can only do this if you're using Google Chrome or Chromium. I'm using Safari here so it works. But if you're using maybe Edge or Firefox, you might not be able to do this. And that's it for speaker notes and PDF Export, two very useful features provided by this Reveal framework. I think this is a great presentation framework. And quite frankly, I would use this instead of maybe PowerPoint or Keynote, because you have more control over how the presentation looks like. If you're using the web-server version, it's really easy to make changes. It's really easy to create templates using Markdown. Overall, I think it's a great, great alternative to what we consider to be the go-to standard for creating presentations. Of course, I guess I'm a little bit, biased because this is an HTML framework. And with my background as web designer or developer, it's really easy for me to use this platform. But I think it has a lot of advantages, a lot of reasons why you should be using this as opposed to using the traditional methods. So I hope this course gave you a nice introduction to use this framework, how you use it, and what exactly you can achieve with it. If you have any questions, please post them in the forums. And I want to thank you very much for watching this course. I'm Adi Purdila, and until next time. Take care