Slide presentations in reStructuredText -> S5 -> PDF

Let’s say you want to create a slide presentation and you are not very much into presentation software.

S5 is a good enough HTML based alternative for a slideshow presentation. reStructuredText and rst2s5 can free you from writing HTML yourself…

S5 can generate a "printer-friendly" version of your slides. But I was really missing a way to create a PDF version of my slides to ease its distribution. I finally found a tool that could handle that Prince.

Example (slides.rst):

.. include:: <s5defs.txt>

======================================================================
reStructuredText to PDF
======================================================================

in 2 easy steps

:Author: Eduardo Schettino


(1) rst2s5
=======================

rst => s5

::

  rst2s5 --theme=small-white slides.rst slides.html


(2) prince
=======================

s5 => PDF

::

  prince --media projection -s page.css slides.html -o slides.pdf

Where page.css controls the PDF page size:

@page { size: 1280px 800px }

Caveats

• Prince is not OpenSource though it provides a free license for non-commercial user.
• Page footer is displayed only on first page.
• Some CSS tweaking might be necessary depending on your theme.