Enforce (or not) slide at the first cell

[damianavila]

From #26:

I'm running into issues with trying to "skip" cells in slideshows with live_reveal. First, if you try to skip the very first fragment (e.g. if it contains import statements, etc.), the cell is not skipped, and the state of the cell is switched to "slide" from "skip" automatically.
This is a design decision because a lot of people could forget to setup the first cell to show as an slide... but you are right about some uses cases where is good to hide the first (or more) cells... I think I have to re-evaluate this decision or come up with a better solution...

[indranilsinharoy]

I think that the "visibility" of any cell shouldn't be enforced, and the cells should behave as expected i.e. if the user has set a cell (first or not) to be "skipped", it should be skipped (it also means, that if someone has forgotten to mark a cell as "skipped" that he/she intended to skip, should be visible in the slide show). In my mind, this is an expected and deterministic behavior. Else, we have to always remember some "special" use-case/ behavior of some special cells. I really don't think any cell should be given special status by default.

[damianavila]

I think you ideas are valuable... and I think right now I am little incline to change the behaviour into no enforce the first slide. I will keep this one opened for a little bit so people who want to give their thoughts can do it... then we can make the change.

[indranilsinharoy]

@damianavila absolutely!! By the way, I wanted to thank you, for creating this. I am very happy that this tool is available, and I hope in the near future, this will evolve, and will be integrated into IPython in a better way. I am going to do my PhD thesis proposal within a month, and I am planning to use this tool.
Regards.

[damianavila]

You are welcome @indranilsinharoy. I hope we can make this better in the future... let's see how far we can go 😉
BTW, very grateful you will use this tool in your proposal 👍

[jmshea]

I would also ask that you not force the first cell to be a slide. I often want to take an existing research notebook and convert it into a slideshow. My first cell is almost always a pile of imports and %matplotlib inline...

[nlsn]

Therefore the first cell should be the title slide.

It's important to put information in a coherent order for the reader.

;)

On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 8:49 AM, jmshea notifications@github.com wrote:

I would also ask that you not force the first cell to be a slide. I often
want to take an existing research notebook and convert it into a slideshow.
My first cell is almost always a pile of imports and %matplotlib inline...

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#29 (comment)
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[jmshea]

The first slide should be a title slide. The imports are set to Skip. Its important to use the capabilities of the slideshow to only show the audience what is needed for the presentation ;-)

[damianavila]

Yes, I think we need to avoid the enforcing... I will update the code base with some fixes this weekend and I will make a new point release. Thanks for the discussion.

[damianavila]

Just to give an update, I still think the same about this, targeting to 3.x compatibility.

[takluyver]

FWIW, I just ran into this and had a WTF moment - I wanted some imports at the top of the notebook so I'd remember to run them before going into presentation mode, but they would be hidden in presentation mode.

Though I can also see that it would be surprising if you went into slide mode and were missing content unexpectedly.

Perhaps automatically make the first cell 'slide' if it doesn't have a slide type set, but if the user sets the slide type to 'skip', assume they mean it.

[damianavila]

Perhaps automatically make the first cell 'slide' if it doesn't have a slide type set, but if the user sets the slide type to 'skip', assume they mean it.

Seems a good compromise...