manim-slides/docs/source/reference/sharing.md

Sharing your slides

Maybe one of the most important features is the ability to share your presentation with other people, or even with yourself but on another computer!

There exists a variety of solutions, and all of them are exposed here.

We will go from the most restrictive method, to the least restrictive one. If you need to present on a computer without prior knowledge on what will be installed on it, please directly refer to the last sections.

:::{note} In the next sections, we will assume your animations are described in example.py, and you have one presentation called BasicExample. :::

With Manim Slides installed on the target machine

If Manim Slides, Manim (or ManimGL), and their dependencies are installed, then using manim-slides present allows for the best presentations, with the most options available.

Sharing your Python file(s)

The lightest way to share your presentation is with the Python files that describe the slides.

If you have such files, you can recompile the animations locally, and use manim-slides present for your presentation. You may want to copy / paste you own .manim-slides.json config file, but it is not recommended if you are sharing from one platform (e.g., Linux) to another (e.g., Windows) as the key bindings might not be the same.

Example:

# If you use ManimGl, add `--GL` after `render`
manim-slides render example.py BasicExample

# This or `manim-slides BasicExample` works since
# `present` is implied by default
manim-slides present BasicExample

Sharing your animations files

If you do not want to recompile all the animations, you can simply share the slides folder (defaults to ./slides). Then, Manim Slides will be able to read the animations from this folder and its subdirectories.

Example:

# Make sure that the slides directory is in the current
# working directory, or specify with `--folder <FOLDER>`
manim-slides present BasicExample

and the corresponding tree:

.
└── slides
    ├── BasicExample.json
    └── files
        └── BasicExample (files not shown)

Without Manim Slides installed on the target machine

An alternative to manim-slides present is manim-slides convert. Currently, HTML and PPTX conversion are available, but do not hesitate to propose other formats by creating a Feature Request, or directly proposing a Pull Request.

A major advantage of HTML files is that they can be opened cross-platform, granted one has a modern web browser (which is pretty standard).

Sharing HTML and animation files

First, you need to create the HTML file and its assets directory.

Example:

manim-slides convert BasicExample basic_example.html

Then, you need to copy the HTML files and its assets directory to target location, while keeping the relative path between the HTML and the assets the same. The easiest solution is to compress both the file and the directory into one ZIP, and to extract it to the desired location.

By default, the assets directory will be named after the main HTML file, using {basename}_assets.

Example:

.
├── basic_example_assets
│   ├── 1413466013_2261824125_223132457.mp4
│   ├── 1672018281_2145352439_3942561600.mp4
│   └── 1672018281_3136302242_2191168284.mp4
└── basic_example.html

Then, you can simply open the HTML file with any web browser application.

If you want to embed the presentation inside an HTML web page, a possibility is to use an iframe:

<div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;">
    <!-- 56.25 comes from aspect ratio of 16:9, change this accordingly -->
    <iframe
        style="width:100%;height:100%;position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;"
        frameborder="0"
        width="100%"
        height="100%"
        allowfullscreen
        allow="autoplay"
        src="basic_example.html">
    </iframe>
</div>

The additional code comes from this article and it there to preserve the original aspect ratio (16:9).

Sharing ONE HTML file

If you set the --one-file flag, all animations will be data URI encoded, making the HTML a self-contained presentation file that can be shared on its own. If you also set the --offline flag, the JS and CSS files will be included in the HTML file as well.

Over the internet

HTML conversion makes it convenient to play your presentation on a remote server.

This is how your are able to watch all the examples on this website. If you want to know how to share your slide with GitHub pages, check out the Manim Slides Starter GitHub repository template.

:::{warning} Keep in mind that playing large video files over the internet network can take some time, and glitches may occur between slide transitions for this reason. :::

Using the Github starter template

A starter template is available which allows to quickly get going with a new Manim slides presentation on your Github account. The template comes ready with functionality to automate tasks using Github actions and publish to Github Pages. Please refer to the template page for usage instructions.

With PowerPoint (EXPERIMENTAL)

A convenient conversion feature is to the PowerPoint format, thanks to the python-pptx package. Even though it is fully working, it is still considered in an EXPERIMENTAL status because we do not exactly know what versions of PowerPoint (or LibreOffice Impress) are supported.

Basically, you can create a PowerPoint in a single command:

manim-slides convert --to=pptx BasicExample basic_example.pptx

All the videos and necessary files will be contained inside the .pptx file, so you can safely share it with anyone. By default, the poster_frame_image, i.e., what is displayed by PowerPoint when the video is not playing, is the first frame of each slide. This allows for smooth transitions.

In the future, we hope to provide more features to this format, so feel free to suggest new features too!

Static PDF presentation

If you ever need backup slides, that are only made of PDF pages with static images, you can generate such a PDF with the following command:

manim-slides convert --to=pdf BasicExample basic_example.pdf

Note that you will lose all the benefits from animated slides. Therefore, this is only recommended to be used as a backup plan. By default, the last frame of each slide will be printed. This can be changed to be the first one with -cframe_index=first.