Is visual editing of slides just a dream?

[ASamarkRoth]

I really appreciate RISE and its huge potential. From an educational perspective, having one document that comprises detailed text and slides, all of it interactive, for the material of one lecture, is certainly difficult to beat.

Comparing to other slide-generating software, to perform visual editing of the slide content is one aspect of RISE that is not possible. My dream would be to be able to drag and resize markdown-rendered text-blocks and notebook outputs after demands and wishes. Will this remain a dream?

Thanks for all the work, looking forward to RISE compatibility with Jupyter-Lab!

[damianavila]

I have been thinking about such a feature for some time by now. One interesting part of the problem is how we can persist the changes (and all the machinery to save the info) we do after the drag an drop actions, because I guess you want to see your changes the next time you show the slideshow.

I can not make any promises but I would be interested to do some exploratory work on this area/idea in the medium term.

Btw, I think we discussed about this idea in the past, I will try to find out the issue and paste a reference here when I have some time to look for it.

[ASamarkRoth]

Yes, I think I grasp what you are saying.

You are probably aware of this, anyhow Slides has enabled some visual editing which can be found under the editing section here: https://slides.com/features. Maybe this can help.

Thanks again for a great tool!

[jedbrown]

@damianavila How much effort do you suppose this would be? I currently have a paid account on slides.com to more efficiently make the sort of presentations where I need a lot of graphics to fit together, entirely because positioning is such a chore with RISE (and Xaringan, Beamer, etc.). I use Jupyter notebooks on my side to generate the figures, so the workflow isn't great, and interactive figures are an issue. I suspect I'm far from alone in liking the RISE workflow and capabilities for more technical talks while falling back to other tools (including Google Slides, Keynote, Powerpoint) for more visual content. I bet it'd be possible to find M commissioners at $N each if they could expect a workable feature in P months.

[damianavila]

@jedbrown thanks for your comment.
This is probably a huge amount of hours... but it is something I would love to see.
The first step is to rewrite this whole extension as a JupyterLab extension (I have started into that task) which is itself a big amount of work. Then we can think into adding visual editing as another extension (or in the same "rise_lab" extension).
And at the end of your message, you are saying something I have been thinking about lately.
We need a very detailed roadmap, fine-grained enough to we can advance in phases and look for funding for those phases (because I would bet it is possible to find that funding).

I am starting to work on that roadmap, and I would love input from the community!
We have a ticket for the roadmap here: #491
On that one, we have some previous discussions with @parmentelat, I will try to add more new stuff soon.