4 releases (2 breaking)
0.3.0 | Feb 5, 2024 |
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0.2.0 | Sep 13, 2022 |
0.1.1 | Sep 13, 2022 |
0.1.0 | Apr 10, 2022 |
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rust-beam
beam is a plaintext slideshow format you can write in faster than beamer.
This is the Rust implementation of the informal beam specification.
Dependencies
Build
Rust stable.
Runtime
A working installation of LaTeX with beamer.
Installation
Run cargo install rust-beam
to install the latest stable version of rust-beam.
Run cargo install --git https://gitlab.com/chennisden/rust-beam.git
to install rust-beam from source.
Specs
Here is an informal specification for the beam file format.
Slides
- Slides are separated by a
~
mark. Whatever text follows~
is the title of the slide. Leave no text after~
if you do not want to set a title. - Leading and trailing whitespace in a line is ignored.
Special characters
-
#
will start a new section, and the title will be the text that follows it on the same line. -
~
will create a new slide, and the title will be the text that follows it on the same line. -
-
can be used to make a list of bullet points. Under the hood, it calls the "itemize" environment in LaTeX. -
>
starts a block. The first line is used as the title (leave it blank for no title). -
<
starts an exampleblock. Again, the first line is used as the title. -
!
starts an alertblock. Again, the first line is used as the title. -
@
can be used to create a slide with a certain image. It is possible, but discouraged, to add text to such a slide. Under the hood, it uses\setbeamertemplate{background}{ \includegraphics[width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight]{IMAGEPATH} }
-
*
can be used to insert an image into the slide. Under the hood, it calls\begin{center} \includegraphics[width=6cm]{IMAGEPATH} \end{center}
-
^
will directly input text verbatim into the preamble. This lets you set the theme, title, and author of a presentation. If a line starts with^
, it will end the current slide, without exception. -
Character escaping is handled by LaTeX, not beam. That means it's impossible to display a line that starts with a raw
-
,!
,>
, or<
character. This is regarded as a design flaw, but a very minor one.
You can also use % to act as a comment, since it's also a comment in LaTeX. Be careful not to start a new slide by accident though.
Examples
All examples can be found in examples/
, and it is assumed that you are in that directory.
An example is contained in "example.beam". Provided that rust-beam
is on your
system, run
rust-beam example.beam
beam will generate an intermediate TeX file and then compile it through
latexmk
. The example is reproduced below.
^ \documentclass{beamer}[12pt]
^ \title{beam}
^ \author{Dennis Chen}
\titlepage
# Introduction
~ What is beam?
- beam is a file format to write presentations with
- beam is a program that converts beam files into beamer
~ Why?
beam does for beamer what Markdown does for HTML
- beamer takes far too long to write.
- We only need a subset of beamer's features
# Features
~ Frametitles
Use the ``~'' character to set the frametitle.
~ Bullet points
- You've already seen it in this presentation.
- Bullet points invoke the ``itemize'' environment.
~ Block
> How to make a block
> This symbol makes a block.
~ Exampleblock
< How to make an exampleblock
< This symbol makes an exampleblock.
~ Alertblock
! How to make an alertblock
! This symbol makes an alertblock.
~ Images
Use the ``\@'' character to set a background image.
~
@beach.jpg
~
You can also use the ``\*'' characater to include an image in the slide.
*beach.jpg
# Miscellaneous
~ Stylization
beam should be written in all lowercase, even at the start of a sentence.