Presentations, but with my own custom viewtemplates?

#1

Dear all,

Both Tamasha by @Mohammad and reveal.js by @sukima enable slide-show style presentations straight out of tiddlywiki, with lots of lovely features.

However, it seems both of them draw straight off of the text field, rendering it through their custom slide templates.

I already have some custom View Templates at work (for example, every excerpt from a book shows up as a quote-bubble emanating from a floating-right graphic of the book cover, with citation info toward the bottom of the tiddler). Only some of my would-be-slides are excerpts that need that view template; others use my view template for books, and still others are more like traditional slides with headers, bullet-lists, and graphics (and these do look fine with the kind of presentation they’re getting with the plugins “out of the box”.)

I don’t have lots of time to fiddle, alas. So I’m wondering if someone with more savvy can tell me whether and how it’s possible to cobble together something like a template-cascade mechanism within a presentation – so that tiddlers can be rendered with the templates I want (They already successfully harness a [$:/tags/ViewTemplateBodyFilter] cascade when I’m not in presentation mode), but benefitting from the navigational controls that are integrated into one of these slideshow plugins.

In theory, couldn’t a presentation plugin be designed to consult such an existing cascade of templates? If not, could there be a recipe for generating a parallel set of filtered templates that play nicely with the slide format?

Any ideas?

-Springer

#2

Hi @Springer
This is possible, but as a quick and wiki wiki solution try this.

Assumptions

  1. You have an excerpt tiddler say exTid, it is viewed through a view template, say exTemplate
  2. You like to have that tiddler shown through that template in a slide

Solutions

  1. Create a new tiddler for exTid, say slide-exTid (you may have to tag it with one you use for presentation)
  2. In the body of slide-exTid enter
{{ exTid || exTemplate }}

Remarks

  1. The solution may seem tedious if you have tens of those tiddlers
  2. No worry a small Wikitext macro can do the job on the fly like
\define slide-with-template(filter, template)
<$button actions=... >
Create Slides
</$button>...
\end
.
.
.
<<slide-with-template filter:"[tag[excerpt]]" template:"exTemplate">>
#3

Mohammad,

thanks for the speedy reply!

I’m sure this would work… However, I’m wary of littering my project with duplicates, especially since I tend to tinker with content on the fly right up until a presentation – and hope to avoid the stress of wondering which added materials might not have their parallel templated versions yet.

I think for now I’ll go with a version of Roman Veselý’s Krystal as modified by @JanJo (demo here: Krystal — an experiment with a horizontal story), which allows a kind of horizontal sliding among tiddlers as slides; each one is already rendered via the standard view template cascade.

In case anyone else follows this presentation path: I do find myself having to tinker with some krystal-specific css (which uses vw unit font-size settings, which makes some sense for slides, but its stylesheet doesn’t cover certain css neighborhoods “out of the box”, such as table contents, dt and dd, and custom classes, so size discrepancies need to be ironed out.) But that should be a one-time tinkering task.

Krystal also copes nicely when a tiddler has too much vertical content (it can simply scroll vertically in place). For that reason, it’s also a good long-term solution that just works to make a presentation with any story river (using view templates just as they are), so that I can in future present fairly spontaneously without second-guessing what will fit within a rectangular slide.

It starts with a nice “card-stack” horizontal story view (with vertical titles at left edge), in addition to JanJo’s single-tiddler presentation slide mode. The horizontal story view is ideal for quickly clicking back to that particular tiddler you want to review during discussion.

On the down-side, I have not yet found a good keyboard shortcut for shifting fluidly between tiddlers with this solution. In slide mode, arrow keys navigate, though you have to make sure you haven’t ended up with a text-field active.

Still, it has a nice magnetic snap-to effect while scrolling sideways So if I have a decent trackpad while presenting, I think it will behave nicely.

-Springer

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#4

Happy to see you use this! Let’s make it better together!
For example it be good to implement short keys for the navigation

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