deckz

Tool to handle a large number of beamer decks, used by several persons, with shared slides amongst the decks. It is currently not meant to be usable directly by people finding about the package on GitHub. Please open an issue if you want more details or want to discuss this solution.

Installation

With pip:

pip install deckz

Shell completion installation

See the --show-completion or --install-completion options of the deckz CLI.

Directory Structure

deckz works with big assumptions on the directory structure of your presentation repository. Among those assumptions:

• your directory should be a git repository
• it should contain a shared folder for everything that will be shared by all decks during compilation (images, code snippets, etc)
• it should contain jinja2 LaTeX templates in the templates/jinja2 directory, with a specific name (listed below)
• it should contain YAML templates in the templates/yml directory, with specific names (listed below)
• your deck folders should be contained in an organization/company folder. This is meant to avoid repeating the company details all over the place
• several configuration should be present to customize the decks efficiently (more on that later)

root (git repository)
├── global-config.yml
├── templates
│   ├── jinja2
│   │   ├── main.tex
│   └── yml
│       ├── company-config.yml
│       ├── deck-config.yml
│       ├── global-config.yml
│       └── user-config.yml
├── shared
│   ├── img
│   │   ├── image1.png
│   │   └── image2.jpg
│   ├── code
│   │   ├── snippet1.py
│   │   └── snippet2.js
│   └── latex
│       ├── module1.tex
│       └── module2.tex
├── company1
│   ├── company-config.yml
│   └── deck1
│       ├── session-config.yml
│       ├── deck-config.yml
│       └── targets.yml
└── company2
    ├── company-config.yml
    └── deck2
        ├── target1
        │   └── custom-module.tex
        ├── deck-config.yml
        └── targets.yml

Configuration

deckz uses small configuration files in several places to avoid repetition.

Configuration merging

The configuration are merged in this order (a value from a configuration on the bottom overrides a value from a configuration on the top):

• global-config.yml
• user-config.yml
• company-config.yml
• deck-config.yml
• session-config.yml

Using the configuration values in LaTeX files

The values obtained from the merged configurations can be used in LaTeX after a conversion from snake case to camel case: if the configuration contains the key trainer_email, it will be defined as the \TrainerEmail command in LaTeX.

Details about specific configurations

Global configuration

The global configuration contains the default values that don't fit at a more specific level.

Example:

presentation_size: 10pt

User configuration

The user configuration contains the values that change when the speaker changes. It is located in the XDG compliant config location. It is $HOME/.config/deckz/user-config.yml on GNU/Linux for example.

Example:

trainer_activity: Data Scientist
trainer_email: [email protected]
trainer_name: John Doe
trainer_specialization: NLP, NLU
trainer_training: MSc at UCL

Company configuration

The company configuration contains everything required to brand the presentations according to the represented company.

Example:

company_logo: logo_company
company_logo_height: 1cm
company_name: Company
company_website: https://www.company.com

Deck configuration

The deck configuration contains the title and acronym of the talk.

Example:

deck_acronym: COV19
deck_title: Machine Learning and COVID-19

Session configuration

The session configuration is optional and contains everything that will change from one session of a specific talk to another one.

Example:

session_end: 30/04/2020
session_start: 27/04/2020

Usage

See the --help flag of the deckz command line tool.