You’ll find many of these here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6MVDtSfcKxd2XLpenMAd9H4VknDyn6oz,
Like the add-ons, and as @mwra put it, tutorials often end up being for an audience of 1. Also, they are extremely costly to develop and maintain.
Take a look at the video links noted above, there are several meetup that have specifically focussed on Pandoc workflows.
Style sheets in preview or templates can be used to control the image size. See the video library, there are several videos that talk about working with images.
When a less experienced user says “this thing should exist,”
and a more experienced user says, “but it already does, here,”
that might be an opportunity to look at the documentation and other on-boarding materials with an eye to “how do we improve discovery of information users need?”
(On the flip side, I’m well aware of the reluctance of many users, sometimes including myself, to actually read the documentation that already exists.)
Keep in mind that most people don’t need pandoc. It’s a great tool when you need it, and Michael Becker really did need it! But lots of people don’t.
@eastgate Thank you! I did look at Michael Becker’s video tutorial on how to create .pptx from tbx notes using pandoc. Not necessary for me. Easier for me to use MS PowerPoint to create the deck.
@satikusala thank you for the links to the great amount of training resources! I have now added the links to them to my browser bar. I look forward to going through them systematically.
The challenge is: what is documentation?
Is it paint-by-numbers in a specific order?
Is it explaining the what? The how? The why?
Is it the when and the context?
Do we also “document” dependencies and contingencies?
Do we include real-world demos?
We’re a global, diverse community coming from wildly different backgrounds. What feels obvious to one person is opaque to another.
And all of this documentation is expensive — time, energy, money, cognitive load — especially in a volunteer community.
It sometimes feels like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — by the time you get to the answer “42,” you’ve forgotten the question.
Documentation is as much art as science.
Now that I’ve gotten that hairball out of my gullet, I’d genuinely love to hear suggestions on how the collective “we” should tackle this. Where do we focus? What do we prioritize? What does “good” even look like for us?
For me, the goal is simply not to get the presentation into PPTX, but first to curate what I want to talk about. I find TBX extremely helpful for this. Once I’ve done this, I can the get it out to TBX into PPTX via Pandoc and then do the final clean up. See this meetup for a review: Tinderbox Meetup 17 JAN 26: Import & Explode, D&D Campaigns, and Presentation Workflows.
@satikusala I see your philosophy - a different perspective! I now understand why you went from tbx to pptx. Thank you for the explanation!