Hexslides is an opinionated presentation tool:

• Slides need not be comprehensible on their own, but support your presentation
• Use handouts/notes in combination with slides if you want standalone content.
• Slides should display what you can't tell easily, not repeat what you are telling anyway.
• Slides should be primarily consist of graphic elements.
• Animations are the most important tool to convey complex ideas.
• I hate Powerpoint - There is nothing worse than elements jumping a few pixels from one slide to the next (but I like GUIs to create graphics).
• I hate Latex Beamer (but like text based slide specifications that produce beautiful pdfs).

Hexslides allows you to create presentations with highly expressive animations in your favorite vector graphic drawing tool (such as Inkscape). Then you combine svg graphics and masters/templates in beautiful presentations.

In short: create svg files in imgs/. Specify which layers are part of which slide by modifying slides.tex. Run make and enjoy your freshly crafted slides.pdf. To get started, you can copy imgs/example.svg and modify it!

A bit longer: for each animation (or slide), you create a simple .svg file, that contains all moving objects as layers. The script gen.rb (which is called by the makefile) converts each individual layer into one individual .pdf file stored in imgs/generated/$filename_$layername.pdf. Then we use Latex to compile all images into a full presentations.

For example, the following code is used to show layer1 in all frames, layer2 only in frame 2 to 4 while layer3 is shown in frames 3 and 5. You can specify visibility using the typicall (for Latex-Beamer) notations such as 3-4,5,7.

\slide{
  \asvg{1-}{example_layer1}
  \asvg{2-4}{example_layer2}
  \asvg{3,5}{example_layer3}
}

The \slide command is a thin wrapper around the \slidecustom command, that can also specify a background and foreground image. By default \slide uses the background from imgs/template.svg but you can simply create different layouts/masters.

\slidecustom{template_clear_bg}{template_foreground}{
  \asvg{1}{example_layer1}
}

Hexslides has first class support for generating handouts. By simply running make handout a handout version of the slides is generated. You can use the anote{} command to embedd a minipage that will only appear in the handouts. In contrast to beamer handouts will include each frame by default as our slides typically make heavy use of animations. However, note how \slide and \slidecustom both take an additional optional argument that specifies which frames to include in the handouts. This is very usefull if you do not want to include all frames, but still want to include some animations.

%create a slide with default background and foreground
% only print frame 1 and 4 in the handouts
\slide[1,4]{ 
  \anote{
    \begin{itemize}
      \visible<1->{\item This slide displays a set of animated frames}
      \visible<4>{\item layer 2 is visible in frames 2 to 4. Note that frame 4 is actually the same as frame 3}
      \visible<4>{\item layer 3 is visible in frames 3 and 4}
    \end{itemize}
  }%
  \asvg{1-}{example_layer1}  %visible in all frames
  \asvg{2-4}{example_layer2} %visible in frames 2 to 4
  \asvg{3,4}{example_layer3} %visible in frames 3 and 4
}

• You can edit theme/gen.rb to replace colors in the svg files. This allows to easily transfer content across themes.
• Edit theme/commands.tex if you need multiple different slide masters to avoid using the longer \slidecustom command too much.
• The default color scheme for dark backgrounds contains two seemingly identical colors main and highlight_red. They differ only in the least significant bit of one channel. This allows the color replacement to assign two different colors. For a bright Theme, main can be turned into black, while highlight_red could remain a darker shade of red. Use this to your advantage to assign semantical colors.
• Typically you will store all elements of a single animation in one svg and use one \slide command to generate a slide from this. However, you can easily split larger animation across multiple svg files or \slide commands. This is helpfull to maintain easy editing (changing frame numbers can be hard for animations with many steps).
• Layers starting with __ are not exported. You can use this to create a backdrop that contains the theme. That way you know exactly what your slide will look like in the final version.
• You can edit pdfs in inkscape. This is very usefull to reuse figures or plots from other sources.
• A list of inkscape tutorials that you might find helpfull:
  • getting started
  • getting started 2
  • getting started 3
  • text ribbons
  • flow charts
  • edit pdf figures

apt-get install inkscape gimp texlive-full texlive-lang-german texlive-doc-de texlive-latex-extra latex-mk
cp theme/hexgolems_theme.gpl ~/.config/inkscape/palettes/
mkdir /tmp/textext
cd /tmp/textext
wget 'https://bitbucket.org/pv/textext/get/9260a2461344.zip'
unzip 9260a2461344.zip
cp -r pv-textext-9260a2461344 ~/.config/inkscape/extensions 

Import the theme/hexgolems_theme.gpl as custom color palete in Inkscape.

Use the textex plugin to render Latex in your svgs, and the provided macros to display the generated pdfs.