35 Presentations and Dashboards: Publishing Ideas Visually
Guiding Question: Can ideas become interactive without abandoning plain text?
For many years, presentations were almost synonymous with slide editors.
Authors arranged text boxes.
Moved images.
Adjusted fonts.
Experimented with layouts.
The process often focused as much on manipulating slides as on communicating ideas.
Plain text publishing offers a different perspective.
A presentation begins not with slides, but with a carefully written document.
The publishing system transforms that document into an engaging visual experience.
Once again, the author’s attention remains where it belongs:
on ideas.
35.1 Writing Before Presenting
A successful presentation is built upon structure.
An introduction.
A sequence of arguments.
Examples.
Illustrations.
A conclusion.
These elements exist long before colours, animations, or themes are considered.
Plain text encourages presenters to think first about communication.
Presentation becomes an extension of writing rather than an exercise in graphic design.
35.2 Reveal.js
One of the most influential presentation frameworks of the modern web is Reveal.js.
Instead of drawing slides manually, authors write structured documents that are transformed into elegant HTML presentations.
The result is remarkably flexible.
Presentations can be:
- viewed in a web browser
- published online
- version controlled
- searched
- maintained like any other text project
For many authors, Reveal.js demonstrated that presentations could become part of the same workflow used for books and websites.
35.3 Beamer
Long before browser-based presentations became common, the LaTeX community embraced Beamer.
Built upon TeX’s exceptional typesetting capabilities, Beamer allows presentations to benefit from the same precision and consistency found in professionally published books.
Mathematics.
Figures.
Cross references.
Bibliographies.
All become natural parts of a presentation.
For scientific and academic audiences, Beamer remains one of the most respected presentation systems available.
35.4 Quarto Presentations
Quarto brings these ideas together within a unified publishing environment.
The same project that produces a book or website can also generate presentations.
Speaker notes.
Incremental slides.
Code examples.
Mathematics.
Citations.
Cross references.
All remain available within a familiar workflow.
The author learns one publishing system.
Many publication formats become possible.
35.5 Speaker Notes and Handouts
Presentations often involve more than projected slides.
Speakers require notes.
Audiences appreciate handouts.
Traditional slide editors frequently treat these as separate concerns.
Modern publishing systems generate them from the same source.
Once again, one document serves many purposes.
The presentation remains consistent across every form in which it is shared.
35.6 Dashboards
Presentation is no longer limited to sequential slides.
Increasingly, readers expect information they can explore.
Dashboards respond to this expectation.
Rather than simply presenting conclusions, they allow users to investigate data, interact with visualizations, and examine information from different perspectives.
Quarto extends its publishing philosophy to dashboards, enabling authors to produce interactive publications from the same structured source used for books, articles, and websites.
The audience moves beyond passive reading.
They become active participants in exploring information.
35.7 Accessibility Through Plain Text
One of the quiet strengths of text-based presentation systems is accessibility.
Because presentations begin as structured documents rather than collections of independently positioned graphical objects, they often integrate naturally into workflows that emphasize semantic structure.
This benefits authors who prefer writing over graphical editing and helps support more consistent, maintainable presentation materials.
The focus remains on communicating ideas clearly rather than manually arranging every visual element.
35.8 Presentation as Publishing
A presentation should not be viewed as separate from publishing.
It is another destination.
The same carefully prepared source may become:
- a book
- a website
- an article
- a presentation
- a dashboard
Only the audience’s mode of engagement changes.
The underlying ideas remain the same.
35.9 Lessons for the Textsmith
Presentation reminds us that communication is ultimately about ideas rather than slides.
Good presentations do not begin with software.
They begin with thoughtful writing.
Plain text publishing allows those ideas to move naturally between books, websites, lectures, and interactive dashboards without asking the author to begin again.
The presentation changes.
The message endures.
35.10 Key Ideas
- Effective presentations begin with clear writing rather than visual design.
- Reveal.js brought plain-text workflows to modern web presentations.
- Beamer demonstrates the enduring value of structured publishing in academic presentations.
- Quarto unifies books, websites, articles, presentations, and dashboards within one publishing system.
- Speaker notes and handouts can be generated from the same source as the presentation itself.
- Dashboards extend publishing into interactive exploration.
- Plain text allows presentations to remain maintainable, reusable, and closely connected to the rest of an author’s publishing workflow.
In the next chapter, we step behind the scenes of modern publishing.
What actually happens between writing a document and publishing a finished work?
There we explore the publishing pipeline itself—the templates, metadata, assets, automation, and build processes that quietly transform structured text into polished publications.