cbeam

A Markdown(ish) to beamer converter.

I really like making beamer presentations, but I find they have a lot of extra stuff to write

\begin{figure}
  \begin{itemize}
    \item{First item}
    \begin{itemize}
      \item{Sub point}
    \end{itemize}
  \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}
  \begin{figure}
    \includegraphics{image}
    \caption{Caption}
    \label{ref}
  \end{figure}
\end{frame}

Enter cbeam. It is a simple-but-not-perfect converted between Markdown files and beamer tex files. See the limitations section for what it can't do (yet or ever).

Installation

A super boring Makefile is provided, allowing you to make, test, and install the utility

$ make
$ make test
$ make install

The install command will try and move cbeam into /usr/bin, which you (understandably) may not want to do nor be able to do. To install into a different location, like ~/.local/bin, you can overwrite the INSTALL_DIR with

$ make INSTALL_DIR=~/.local/bin install

Additionally, you can provide the compiler through the Makefile with

$ make CC=cc

Your c compiler of choice should work fine.

$ gcc cbeam.c -o cbeam

Usage

cbeam reads from the standard input and writes to standard output, e.g.

$ ./cbeam < input.md > output.tex

will convert the contents of input.md to output.tex, which should be a valid beamer file. For a quick read, the file test.md demonstrates most of the capabilities and rules.

Rules

Frames are considered to be lines of text separated by one or more empty lines. Lines are processed separate from previous and subsequent lines. It is the opinion of the author that frames should not have too much text. Lists especially should be fairly short.

A frame title can be configured by starting a line with two asterisks,

**Frame title**
Frame contents

**New frame**
Some more stuff

The presentation title and (sub)sections are configured by headings,

# Title of the presentation

## Section title

### Subsection
#### Subsubsection

## New section

Spacing does not matter between headings.

The parser assumes you are configuring the preamble (author, title, date, etc.) A non-empty line that does not contain a preamble command (see below) or the heading level 1 line will start parsing the main document. To keep things on the safe side, put your # Title towards the top of your document, before you start writing frames of other non-preamble commands.

Lines are processed as they are read. Any malformed lines or content out of place may terminate the program, and/or produce a non-valid tex file. One exception is the :toc: command, which can be placed in the preamble, but will immediately switch to parsing the main document. This means that the following

:author: Me, myself, and I
:toc:
:date: The future

will place the \date tex directive inside your main work and potentially not render well.

The first slide is always a title slide.

Bulleted and numbered lists are captured directly from Markdown. Bullets create itemize environments and must start with either * or - . Note the space. Numbered lists don't have to be ordered, just matching the pattern ^[0-9]+\. . The content following any initial whitespace is placed directly inside an \item{content} directive.

Some text command are provided to help configure the preamble and table of contents. Many of the commands are of the form :cmd: Value where the Value argument will be dumped into the corresponding tex command.

Preamble commands

• :author: Author list configures the author list.
• :date: today configures the date. If today is found, the special \today value will be set
• :theme: Theme configures the primary document theme
• :colors: scheme configures the color theme
• :inner: inner configures the inner theme
• :outer: outer configures the outer theme
• :pkg: package introduces a package with no options, \usepackage{package}

Main document commands

These commands should be included inside the main body of your document.

• :toc: triggers a frame devoted to the table of contents. No arguments are used
• :caption: Caption sets a (figure only) caption
• :label: ref sets a reference (for a figure. Sections etc. maybe?)
• :sectionpage: creates a frame that introduces a section with sectionpage

Limitations

Not yet

In order of decreasing priority

• Nested lists
• In-line captions for figures
• Tables (can use \input{table.tex} as a work around)
• Short title directives like \author[M.P]{The honorable Monty Python}
• Section overviews
• In-line bold and italics using **markdown** __commands__ (\textbf{markdown} \textit{should} work)
• Some input processing (read from file, write to file)

Maybe ever

• Two columns
• tikz without using \input{myfigure.tex}
• Transitions

License

Copyright 2020 Andrew Johnson

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Other licenses

The glorious XKCD comic that serves as an example image can be found at https://xkcd.com/1205/, copyright Randall Monroe under creative commons attribution non-commercial 2.5 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/