Building a presentation with reveal.js is such a pleasure. And the results looks so good. Seriously doubt that I will ever use anything like PowerPoint again. Although it’s possible to export a presentation directly to PDF using a style sheet, this doesn’t always work perfectly (IMHO).
Fortunately there’s another way: decktape. It works with reveal.js and a bunch of other HTML5 presentation frameworks.
You can install decktape using npm, but my preferred approach is to use a Docker container.
Simple Conversion
Presentation Hosted Online
If you have your presentation hosted online, say at https://www.example.com/presentation then convert to PDF as follows:
docker run --rm -v `pwd`:/slides astefanutti/decktape https://www.example.com/presentation slides.pdf
Presentation Hosted Locally
If you are hosting the presentation locally then you can also do this:
docker run --rm --net=host -v `pwd`:/slides astefanutti/decktape http://localhost:8000 slides.pdf
But it will only work if everything is hosted locally (all of the CSS, JavaScript etc.).
Local File
It’s also apparently possible to generate PDF from a local HTML file (without actually serving that file), but I haven’t managed to figure that out yet. Would definitely make the process slightly easier. However, just spinning up a local web server with Python is almost effortless, so it’s not a big deal.
Options
Screen Size
I initially found that some images would be misplaced in the resulting PDF. The solution to this was to specify a screen size. I chose the size of my laptop screen (since the HTML looked good at that size). Simply use the -s option.
docker run --rm -v `pwd`:/slides astefanutti/decktape -s 1920x1080 https://www.example.com/presentation slides.pdf