I received some feedback on the ‘Presenting Code’ post from yesterday.

Presenting Code … An Update

I got lots of feedback on the “Presenting Code” post. In addition to Cédric Beust’s initial comments, the following people had something to say on the topic:

John Wilger asked on Twitter why I didn’t use “file:” (rather than “http:” and a local web server). Unfortunately, Keynote will not do a web view from a “file:” style URL.

Luke Kanies reports that he does something similar. He uses Vim (rather than Ruby + the Syntax gem) to generate the highlighted HTML. He also adds:

In general, this method works out great, but the one thing I would say is that you should always uncheck “automatic update”. Otherwise, you’ll find that it tries to update 10 seconds before your presentation starts and your web server isn’t available.

Ok, that’s good advice. BTW, I would be very interested in a script (AppleScript or Ruby+OSA) that would iterate over the pages in a Keynote presentation and refresh all the WebViews. Any takers?

James Edward Gray II and Mike Clark mentioned the HTML output bundle. James gives the following details:

• Select Bundles → TextMate → Create HTML From Document (or Create HTML From Document With Line Numbers, if you prefer)
• Preview the document in TextMate with Window ⇢ Show Web Preview
• Highlight and Edit → Copy the content you want from the HTML window
• Switch to Keynote and Edit → Paste

Mike (who credits Bruce Williams as his source for this tip) also provided a video.

Couple of items on the above:

1. When creating the HTML from the document, convert the whole document. Once in Web Preview mode you can cut and paste only what you want.
2. Choose a TextMate theme with a background that matches the background in your presenetation to get the best effect for your colors.

Dr. Nic also mentions a “Copy as RTF” TextMate bundle. (I’m not sure if this is the same as James and Mike’s hint above or something different).

Finally, Chris Nelson confirms (via Twitter): “AFAIK there is no equivalent of web views in OpenOffice :(“