keynote-export

This is a program that can export Keynote presentations in formats that are better for sharing them.

• It generates an html presentation in a minimalist, reader-friendly format.
• It generates a nicely-formatted PDF like this one, suitable for uploading to Speakerdeck or others.

Natively,

• Keynote will export slides with presenter notes as a PDF. But the resulting formatting is terrible, giving 50% of each page of the PDF up to the notes.
• Keynote will export an HTML document, but it won't include presenter notes with it.

This program addresses both of these issues.

Setup

You can install this program using pipx:

pipx install keynote-export

Examples and Screenshots

Here is an example of the HTML site generated.

You also get PDF presentation slides that look like this:

Instead of the crappy ones that Keynote gives you:

A full PDF sample can be found here.

Usage

Use keynote-export --help to see all of the available options. Basically,

keynote-export \
  --keynote=<the keynote file> \
  --outdir=<a path> \
  --title=<the name of the presentation> \
  --bluesky-handle=<your BlueSky username> \
  --mastodon-handle=<your Mastodon username>

The output path gets both a PDF file and a self-contained website that you can easily host with (for example) GitHub pages.

There are optional flags for the parts of the page that aren't slides:

  --abstract=<a markdown file>   rendered under the title
  --footer=<a markdown file>     rendered in the footer
  --favicon=<an svg>             derives favicon.ico, apple-touch-icon.png and
                                 the manifest icons, and links them
  --header-link=<a url>          a small link above the title, with
  --header-link-text=<a label>   its label
  --url=<where it will live>     needed for og:url and og:image, which have
                                 to be absolute
  --description=<one line>       for search results and link previews
  --share-image=<an image>       the link preview picture. Defaults to the
                                 first slide.

The markdown files are read on every run, so they are where that copy should live — the generated index.html gets overwritten each time.

Notes

You must have Keynote installed to use this.

--favicon rasterizes the SVG with librsvg (brew install librsvg) when it is installed, and falls back to Quick Look, which ships with macOS but flattens transparency onto white. Scale and crop the SVG how you want it first; the derivatives are straight resamples of it.

The slides are published as webp, which some link scrapers still refuse to render, so --share-image is written out separately as share.jpg. Open Graph also requires absolute URLs, so og:url and og:image are only emitted when --url is given.

Fundamentally, this works by scripting Keynote using Applescript. The details of this helpfully change from Keynote version to version. So if the script isn't working, it might be that I haven't updated it recently and minor tweaks are needed for the latest version of Keynote. Pull requests welcome!