slipshow.org

What It Is

Slipshow is an open-source presentation tool designed to combine the continuous derivations and hand-drawn expression of blackboard-style teaching with the reusability and programmability of digital presentations. Rather than centering on fixed slides, it supports scrolling, zooming, and content organization similar to an infinite canvas. Users describe content in files, while the tool handles formatting and generates standalone HTML.

Core Capabilities

Functionally, Slipshow supports compiling Markdown, mathematical content, syntax highlighting, embedded PDFs, video, and audio. It also supports presenter view, notes, themes, custom dimensions, hot reload, and multi-file input. One particularly distinctive feature is annotation recording and playback: presenters can hand-draw complex diagrams or derivations on screen, then replay them during the presentation. For developers, it also allows embedded JavaScript and lets users schedule animations or visualizations as needed, making it suitable for technical talks, courses, and thesis defenses.

Open Source, Pricing, and Ecosystem

The main text clearly states that Slipshow is an open-source project with a public development process. Users can report bugs, contribute code, or communicate via email/Zulip. In terms of pricing, no commercial plans are shown; the author accepts donations via GitHub Sponsors. The ecosystem includes a documentation site, tutorials, an example gallery, and online trial plus real-time collaborative editing through sliphub. However, the main text does not explain sliphub’s pricing, deployment model, or stability commitments.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are a clear concept and a break from the page-size and discrete-slide limitations of traditional PPT. It generates standalone HTML, making distribution and hosting flexible, and it has strong support for math, code, animations, and hand-drawn derivations. Its drawbacks are that the workflow is developer-oriented, requiring comfort with Markdown, scripting, and nonlinear canvas thinking. Information on commercial support, payments, SLAs, third-party integrations, and similar enterprise needs is limited, so it may not be ideal for standardized corporate office scenarios.

Who It’s For and Access from China

Slipshow is better suited to teachers, researchers, developer advocates, and anyone who needs to explain complex technical concepts clearly. If you are only making business reports, PowerPoint/Keynote may be more straightforward. For web-based technical presentations, it can be compared with Reveal.js, Marp, and Slidev; if canvas-style zooming matters, Prezi is also a relevant comparison. Access from China is not mentioned in the main text, so the availability of the official site, documentation, and GitHub Sponsors needs to be tested in practice. Payment information beyond sponsorship is also not provided.