fossacademic.tech
Marp + BeautifulSoup
<p>The FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream just got a bit dreamier.</p> <p>Previously, <a href="/2024/12/01/marp.html">I wrote about Marp</a>, which is a <a href="https://marp.app/">Markdown-based way to generate presentation slides</a>. When I wrote about Marp last, I was speculating that it would be very useful:</p> <blockquote> <p>I’m going to do it: I’m going all-on on Marp for a while…. I suspect Marp is a future fixture of the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream.</p> </blockquote> <p>Well, it’s true. On Friday, I gave a presentation over Zoom using a Marp-based slide deck. You can <a href="https://robertwgehl.org/presentations/ITS_presentation.html">see the files here</a>. It worked wonderfully!</p> <p>And I did something more. Marp produces responsive, semantic HTML. HTML can be parsed with <a href="https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/">BeautifulSoup</a>, a Python library.</p> <!-- more --> <p>Marp enables me to easily add slide notes with basic HTML comments, like this:</p> <div class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><!-- Slide notes go here --> </code></pre></div></div> <p>After Marp processes the Markdown file and converts it into HTML, I could see that those comments with a class, “bespoke-marp-note.” Which means I could pull out all the notes directly from the HTML and create a new file, with the notes only, with BeautifulSoup.</p> <p>I’m no programmer, but I can search for guides with the best of them. I wrote a python script to pull the comments and produce a second HTML with just my script. <a href="https://robertwgehl.org/presentations/ITS_presentationText.html">Here’s the result</a>.</p> <p>This gives me a great time-saver: instead of writing a script and creating the slides separately, I just do it all in one Markdown file, and the scripts generate everything I need from that single file. This will save hours of work!</p> <p>Another nice thing about this is that I can share the text of my presentation easily over the web. Prior to this, I rewrote the presentation as a new Markdown file and posted it to the blog. That would add hours to the task. The new way will be automated!</p> <p>Here’s the Pyton script I wrote (if you see poor coding on my part, be gentle):</p> <div class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS from bs4 import Comment import requests import getopt, sys # This gets the system argument, which should be the Markdown file I'm exporting filename = sys.argv[1] # strips the final three characters, '.md', from the file name filename = filename[:-3] # changes file name for text filenameText = filename + 'Text.html' print(filenameText) # adding local HTML file with open(filename + '.html') as f: soup = BS(f, 'html.parser') # parsing notes # this will add a header, print to file i = 0 presentation = (soup.find('h1')) content = '''<html> <body>''' content += str(presentation) # this will add slide headers and the notes for note in soup.find_all(class_='bespoke-marp-note'): i += 1 content += '<h2>Slide ' + str(i) + '</h2>' content += str(note) content += ''' <!-- Some javascript here --> </body> </html> ''' # Writing the content to an HTML file with open(str(filenameText), 'w') as file: file.write(content) </code></pre></div></div> <p>You might notice a variable, “filename = sys.argv[1]”. That is there because I wrote a bash script, exportPresentation.sh, to automate the whole export process:</p> <div class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>#!/bin/bash ~/.local/share/marp/marp --theme ./CSS/custom.scss --html $1 python pullComments.py "$1" </code></pre></div></div> <p>That little script invokes marp-cli to convert the Markdown file, and then the python script recieves the file name (e.g., I’d type “sh exportPresentation.sh presentation.md” into the shell).</p> <p>Again, much like using CSS to build a presentation, coming up with these scripts took a bit of time, but in the long run, I’m making presentation creation – and sharing! – that much easier.</p>
