Implementation of marp for slide shows

[harrelfe]

Description

I just discovered marp for producing beautiful slide shows from simple markdown specifications similar to the markdown used in slide presentations with Quarto. marp produces self-contained html files and also pptx, pdf, and others. The reason for using marp is that the html files it produces are 50 times smaller than those produced by reveal.js and 8 times smaller than those produced by ioslides, in some simple tests I ran. The marp command line program is a standalone binary that’s not too big. What about adding it to Quarto’s repertoire?

[harrelfe]

You can get part of the way there using format: commonmark in the .qmd file but you have to do a lot of editing of the resulting .md file, such as changing all -------------------... to ---; change - bullet symbols to *; get rid of newlines inserted into bullet text, remove an initial blank line inserted as a result of include-in-header: marpheader.md where marpheader.md is something like

---
theme: gaia
_class: lead
paginate: true
backgroundColor: #fff
header: '![w:150](logo.png)'
_paginate: false     # no page number on title slide
marp: true              # for VS Code editor
---

[mcanouil]

If the editing obeys some rules, a post-render can be written.
Then you can even create an extension for that.

[harrelfe]

Thanks. The hardest part is that quarto rendering into commonmark breaks lines within bullet points, making marp output not flow correctly. Easier to fix is a strange problem where bullet lines starting with * are changed by quarto to - which I thought commonmark preferred, but this makes Marp not treat the bullet point as progressively revealed.

I added a Marp template/example here with output here. This did not use quarto.

[mcanouil]

Note that the "writers" are the ones from Pandoc.