Use Restructured Text (ReST) to power your presentations

Wednesday, we give a presentation, with some friends, about the CouchDB Database, to the Toulouse local LUG. Thanks a lot to all the presents for being there, it was a pleasure to talk about this topic with you. Too bad the season is over now an I quit Toulouse next year.

During our brainstorming about the topic, we used some paper, and we wanted to make a presentation the simpler way. First thing that come to my mind was using restructured text, so I’ve wrote a simple file containing our different bullet points. In fact, there is quite nothing to do then, to have a working presentation.

So far, I’ve used the rst2pdf program, and a simple template, to generate output. It’s probably simple to have similar results using latex + beamer, I’ll try this next time, but as I’m not familiar with latex syntax, restructured text was a great option.

Here are the final PDF output, Rhe ReST source, the theme used, and the command line to generate the PDF:

rst2pdf couchdb.rst -b1 -s ../slides.style