The last two presentations I’ve given have been created using reveal.js and d3.js. This combination of technologies allows for some nice data-driven animation. For example, my BuildSys presentation on Neural NILM is available to view here and the source code is here. I was honoured to learn that my BuildSys presentation won joint best presentation!

The challenge comes when we want to convert these presentations to PDF. Reveal does have a PDF export feature but it didn’t seem to work well for me for the D3 animation slides. So here’s my hacky solution on Ubuntu 15.04:

  1. Set the monitor resolution to 1024x768 (the resolution I designed the slides for)
  2. Set the browser to full-screen.
  3. Print-screen each slide (after the animation has completed) using alt-printscreen (with the browser selected).
  4. Convert to postscript using imagemagik: convert -level 0%,100%,1.0 -quality 100% *.png presentation.ps. I tried converting directly to PDF using imagemagik but it kept trying to squash the grey background to black on some slides, which really messed things up. I tried tinkering with imagemagick parameters such as level, quality, background, black-threshold, white-threshold, linear-stretch, contrast-stretch, black-threshold, black-point-compensation but I couldn’t get imagemagick to output a sensible PDF. But it would output a pretty sensible postscript file.
  5. Convert ps to pdf using this command: gs -o presentation.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -g1024x768 -dPDFFitPage -r72 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer presentation.ps

I expect there is a better solution! Let me know if you know of a better solution, please!