# Use Restructured Text (ReST) to power your presentations

  - date  
    2010-06-25

  - category  
    tech

Wednesday, we give a presentation, with some friends, about the CouchDB
Database, to [the Toulouse local LUG](http://www.toulibre.org). 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](http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html), 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](http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf/), 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](http://files.lolnet.org/alexis/rst-presentations/couchdb/couchdb.pdf),
[Rhe ReST
source](http://files.lolnet.org/alexis/rst-presentations/couchdb/couchdb.rst),
[the theme
used](http://files.lolnet.org/alexis/rst-presentations/slides.style),
and the command line to generate the PDF:

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