Writing training slides and a workbook at once

Question

I'm going to rework one of our trainings in our company. There will be more reworked trainings with the next year. As a side note, we offer technical trainings, so we need slides filled with source code, diagrams and schematics.

Currently we use PowerPoint for slides (4:3 format) and PowerPoint's notes mode to add additional information. The given space can be used by the attendees for handwritten notes, too. The notes view is printed on A4 paper size and bundled to a book auf 400 to 800 pages depending on the class.

With this approach, we have one document for slides and printing. Currently, there is still a high demand to get all materials in as a printed version. On the other hand it protects our intellectual property from being copied. We see lots of companies sending one person to a training and later replicating the knowledge internally.

Nowadays, presenters have changed from 4:3 format to 16:9 format. This gives more space on slides. But 16:9 is not suitable for PowerPoint's notes mode and printing on A4, because it creates circa 1/3 of content on a page and 2/3 of empty space or spaces for additional notes.

I would like to switch to 16:9 format, which means to have slides and workbook separated.

Is there a tool that can serve as a single source of truth for both formats: slides and workbook?

Requirements:

• generate presentation slides and printout workbook from one source file.
• 16:9 presentation format
• presentations with tiny animations: hide, appear, opaque overlay box
• have control over pagebreaks

Nice to have:

• create a table of contents

Answer 1

I would suggest taking a look at the following combination of tools:

• Jupyter Notebooks - Allows you to combine (in your browser)
  • Text as Markdown (mostly the same as you use here)
  • Rendered Mathematical Formulas in MathJax & Tex
  • Images & Links
  • Syntax Highlighted Code
  • Live, executable, code in any of dozens of programming languages by using the different kernels including Python, C, R, Julia, and Scala, Fortran, Spark, Ruby, Haskell, JavaScript, Go, SageMath, MATLAB, Java, etc.
  • The results of Executing the code (and you can optionally re-execute the code during your presentation).
  • Graphs & Charts (including interactive charts & graphs) generated from stored or live data or from the processing results.
  • Animations & Videos
• NBConvert (a part of Jupyter) which allows you to publish your Notebooks as webpages (HTML), pdf files or Latex files (for printing) or via custom exporters.
• Reveal.js - HTML Presentation framework (which does allow you to specify the display dimensions and get a 16:9 aspect ratio).
• RISE - Reveal.js - Jupyter/IPython Slideshow Extension which allows live conversion from a Jupyter Notebook to a slideshow or presentation.

Your slides can use transition effects and you can get a project that allows a fancier look from here which was used to create an example slideshow.

This combination will allow you to produce, from a single Jupyter Notebook both your presentations at any aspect ratio or screen size, (with interaction), and your distributed PDF files all the way up to full book format. It is even possible to create & grade assignments from within the Jupyter Notebooks by using NBGrader.