Stagecraft

About

This tool exports a Reveal.js Web Presentation to to a PDF or PPTX using Playwright Chromium. The PPTX can then be used to import to Google Presentations – including text overlays ;)

I'm not much into TypeScript and this project was also a little expedition into the ECMA/TypeScript landscape. Honestly, I very much missed Python Data Classes or @attr and the toolchain gave me not what I'd expect from a dynamic language.

Features

• Adjust Zoom Level
• Have a 1:1 visual representation by using real screenshots
• Embed Slide Notes and maintain Links and as overlay
• Export as PDF or PPTX

Usage

For now bin/stagecraft:

Usage: stagecraft [options] [command]

Screenshot Reveal.js presentation in chromium using playwright and create PPTX or PDF

Options:
  -V, --version                    output the version number
  -h, --help                       display help for command

Commands:
  export                           Create stagecraft export
  generate-pdf [options] [string]  Generate a PDF from a stagecraft export
  generate-pptx [options]          Generate a PPTX from a stagecraft export
  help [command]                   display help for command

How Does it work?

The tool is basically divided into two passes:

Dump/Export

• Use Playwright and chromium to open a Reveal.js Presentation (as HTTP URL)
• Iterate through slide (by invoking the "Space" ley) and make screenshots (save to disk)
• Create a stagecraft.json
  • with slide notes, link and layout information embedded
  • and screenshots-%04d.png alongside

Generate PPTX/PDF

• Generate PPTX or PDF from the dumped screenshits and the stagecraft.json file.

Development Environment Setup

The OCI develpment image is not ready yet, therefore:

1. Install NodeJS 18 along with NPX and NPM

2. Install dependencies

   npm install
   

3. Install browser for playwright

   npx playwright install chrome
   

4. Install TSX (Node.js enhanced to run TypeScript & ESM)

   npm install -g tsx
   

5. Run app with tsx index.tsor bin/stagecraft

TODO

• CLI Interface

  • Turn hardcoded values into options

• Compile TS to JS using @vercel/ncc and build efficient OCI image that only uses nodejs runtime (since I do not want to package 600MB+ of node_modules into a container image; vercel/ncc build does 8.9MB includign a matching app icon!)

• Development Environment

  • Makefile
  • Devcontainer Setup
  • Distro Container (hopefully we can base on alpine)

Appendix

Bun

./stagecraft export doesn't work with bun but building PDF and PPTX (which is only 0.08 o 0.11x faster – so bun – no to the hype)

47 |     const e = new _errors.TimeoutError(error.error.message);
48 |     e.stack = error.error.stack || '';
49 |     return e;
50 |   }
51 |   const e = new Error(error.error.message);
52 |   e.stack = error.error.stack || '';
                ^
TypeError: launch: launch: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'pipeRead.on')

Please read: The Jared Wilcurt: Bun hype. How we learned nothing from Yarn especially the "Bun is actually much worse" section