Slideshow theme and landing page

[Chrissy Safranski]

I made slides using pretext for the first time, using codespaces and the CLI, pretext new project-> slideshow.  Everything went smoothly and as I would have expected except for 2 things: 

1) the list of reveal themes included one called Dracula, which didn't seem to actually work - there was no styling when I tried to view.  No big deal, I picked a different theme that did work, but I thought it was worth a report. I don't think I found a PreTeXt-specific list of supported reveal.js themes, just this Guide description Subsection 44.5.1: Reveal.js Appearance, so I googled for reveal themes and got here: https://revealjs.com/themes/

2) After using pretext deploy, the message told me that my deployed project would be at https://tanaquil18.github.io/fie2025slides/ but I got a 404 error.  I also went to my repository on github and checked the actions and it said it had deployed my project successfully, and the repository settings for github pages had that same url. I had changed the name of my repository after creating it and my codespace, so I thought that was the issue and tried some other things to no avail.  Finally, I thought about what the difference was between a book with a default frontmatter page versus a slideshow and just naively tried navigating to https://tanaquil18.github.io/fie2025slides/slides.html instead and voila!  There was my project, probably the whole time.  

Experimenting more after the fact shows that index.html and main.html give 404 errors, so it appears I made a very fortunate guess!  Is there something that can be done to make the default landing page more intuitive for a deployed slideshow created using the pretext template for new slideshow?

Chrissy

[Rob Beezer]

On fone, since our power is out. Can you poke around in your CLI output and see if/where the themes from Reveal live? Perhaps that collection needs to be fresher? Maybe you can get all that stuff from Reveal, swap it in and see Dracula? I think the XSL is just putting the right string in the right place and I do not recall seeing Dracula a couple years ago. Perhaps it is just a contributed theme and not official?

All speculation. More once the electrons start flowing again.

Yes, the output is always a single mammoth file. So with pretext/pretext you only get one file in your destination directory and you can control the name. Perhaps the CLI can be more helpful with all that.

Rob

On November 1, 2025 7:36:29 AM PDT, Chrissy Safranski <tanaq...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I made slides using pretext for the first time, using codespaces and the
>CLI, pretext new project-> slideshow. Everything went smoothly and as I
>would have expected except for 2 things:
>
>1) the list of reveal themes included one called Dracula, which didn't seem
>to actually work - there was no styling when I tried to view. No big deal,
>I picked a different theme that did work, but I thought it was worth a
>report. I don't think I found a PreTeXt-specific list of supported
>reveal.js themes, just this Guide description Subsection 44.5.1: Reveal.js
>Appearance

><https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/publication-file-revealjs.html#revealjs-appearance-options>,

[David Austin]

I just happen to be writing a slideshow today.  Using the CLI with a local installation, pretext view opens the directory that contains slides.html.  So I just see a listing of the files, and I select slides.html and everything's fine.  It could be that the permissions in the codespace prevent this resulting in the 404 error, but perhaps this is an issue in the CLI with a simple fix.

I usually choose a custom theme (I like "simple") so I follow these instructions and do some customization:  Paragraphs: Local Resources

You expected Dracula to appear on November 1?

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[Oscar Levin]

Switching this to -dev, since I think we could use some discussion about how the CLI should name the slideshow by default.  I don't remember if we are specifying "slides.html" or that is coming from PreTeXt proper, but the CLI can name it anything we want.  We could also easily create an "index.html" redirect to that page so that `pretext view` and `pretext deploy` work as desired.  So what should defaults be?  Would anyone object to the default being "index.html" inside the `target/@name` folder?  Note this is just a CLI change, so pretext/pretext script users will not be effected in any way.

I too had noticed that some themes just work and others do not.  I'll work on updating the default publication file to only list working themes as options.

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[David Austin]

It feels like "index.html" is the right choice.  Thanks, Oscar.

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