enter action being added to blockquoteschange-page action (#144)play-media action (#139, #142)children: not working sometimes (#135)--toplevel-attributes to control the attributes on the toplevel container (#137)" sometimes being present in Cmarkit, removing the need for hacks workarounds. (#135)--dimension to specify the dimension of the presentation (#131){include src="path/to/file.md"} to include a file in another (#114)pause to have a target (#118)step to execute actions (#118)---) to group blocks (#129)children: (#130)-at-unpause (#133)Split commands in groups (#112). Examples:
slipshow file.md becomes slipshow compile file.mdslipshow --serve file.md becomes slipshow serve file.mdslipshow --markdown-output file.md becomes slipshow markdown file.md--theme argument and a command to list the themes: slipshow themes list (#109)slip object. (#104)slip.onUndo, slip.setProp and slip.state. (#97)scroll action to scroll up or down, if needed (#107)Quick release mostly to allow publishing on opam!
-dirty suffix on slipshow --version.Dear readers,
I am thrilled to announce the 0.1 release of Slipshow, the slip-based presentation tool!
This is a major minor release. While versions 0.0.1 to 0.0.33 have served well to experiment, this release marks a fresh start, aimed at being a solid foundation for a project with a clear direction. A huge thank you to NLNet for sponsoring this milestone!
So, what is new? Quite a lot, the main change being that the engine has been fully rewritten.
Started as a single file javascript project, the old engine evolved presentation by presentation -- leading to numerous bugs, maintenance challenge or extensibility issue. (In other word, I did all I could not to touch it despite all the bugs)
This release introduces a complete rewrite of the engine in OCaml, with new design choices that improve reliability and expandability. Let's go over the key benefits and breaking changes.
One of the greatest weakness of the old engine was handling backward navigation. Since it started as a simple "script scheduler", going back wasn't straightforward. The workaround involved taking a snapshot of... everything (the DOM, the state, ...), to be able to go back in time.
This had many bugs, in animations (such as the "focus" action), and in its iteraction with other features (such as drawing).
So, what is new in this engine? The engine now records an undo function for each step of the presentation. While this may not sound much, it is a ton better in terms of development. It's a much stronger foundation to build new features from. It's also much more efficient for long presentations.
In most cases, your old presentations will work without modification in the new engine. However, there is one case where it needs modification: when you include the execution of a custom script in your presentation. In this case, you need to return the function undo to undo the executed step: see the documentation! (This is not ideal and better solutions are being experimented)
Previously, live annotations used the excellent atrament library. While great in many cases, its bitmap-based approach caused blurriness when zooming.
This release introduces a custom SVG-based annotation system, which eliminates zoom issues. Another change: erasing now works stroke-by-stroke instead of pixel-by-pixel.
The old table of contents was based on the slip structure, which didn’t work well for presentations that primarily used a single slip (as is often the case with compiled presentations).
The new sidebar-style table of contents is now generated from headers, making it more intuitive and aligned with the presentation’s structure—resulting in a much smoother navigation experience!
The HTML structure for subslips has evolved, in particuler to avoid having to provide the scale of your subslips.
Support for subslip in the new engine is not mature and will be announced in the next release, but bear in mind that if your presentation relies on them, you might want to wait a bit before migrating to the new engine!
While this release focuses on the engine, the compiler has also seen improvements, including bug fixes (particularly in the parser) and a new feature:
--markdown-output for markdown exportsIf you want to print your presentation or host it as a static webpage, the default format can be cluttered with annotations. The new --markdown-output flag lets you generate a clean, GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) file without annotations.
Beyond technical improvements, there are some important project-wide updates:
Several improvements did not make it in this release, but are already quite advanced. So here is a little peek into the future:
Looking forward to your bug reports!
--serve sometimes not working by using long-polling instead of websockets.--serve not working on MacOS (#65, @patricoferris)localhost in musl-based compilation--serveslip-script attributes--serve when saving, using slipshow previewrelease mode for compiler, to save space# anchors to directly get to a state. Also, send that to a parent window, if any, and listen for messages from the parent window for state to jump into.emph-at-unpause and unemph-at-unpause attributes.