Recently I came across a presentation making tool in R called "Slidify", by Ramnath Vaidyanathan. At the outset, it is impressive. A few advantages using slidify in R
1. One can embed the R code (or even some other code) directly in the slides.
2. The R code can be executed run time when the slides are prepared (I suppose other languages can also be executed run time with appropriate set-up)
3. The plots (and other outputs) executed in R can directly be captured in the slides.
Works seamlessly in Chrome and Firefox.
For using the "slidify" we just need
1. An R environment with required tools installed (one can follow the procedure in slidify.org website)
2. An "Rmd" - R mark down file, where the contents and code are written into.
It has plug and play support with multiple options for
1. Framework - The look and feel, theme of the slides
2. Highlights - The code highlighting support
3. Widgets - Tools for support like equation editing, making online quiz and much more.
For equation editing, the "mathjax" tool is quite good, which is readily supported. Additional Info: Many of the coursera courses uses mathjax tool to render mathematical equations. Further I remember, my Professor Jeff Leek used Slidify for his slides in his "Data Analysis" course in coursera.
Slidify makes use of two key libraries among others.
1. Knitr - This converts the R markdown files to ordinary markdown files.
2. markdown - This R library converts the markdown files to html files.
The output will be a dynamic, interactive html file with all required support files - css, js etc.
An off-note on a relevant topic:
Markdown (wiki) was originally conceptualized by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz in 2004. It has been in wide use since then.
