Using Hovercraft!¶
You can either use Hovercraft! to generate the presentation as HTML in a target directory, or you can let Hovercraft! serve the presentation from it’s builtin webserver.
The latter have several benefits. One is that most webbrowsers will be very reluctant to open popup-windows from pages served from the file system this is a security measure which can be changed, but it’s easier to just point the browser to http://localhost:8000 instead.
The second benefit is that Hovercraft! will monitor the source files for the presentation, and if they are modified Hovercraft! will generate the presentation again automatically. That way you don’t have to run Hovercraft! everytime you save a file, you only need to refresh the browser.
Parameters¶
hovercraft [-h] [-t TEMPLATE] [-c CSS] [-a] [-s] [-n] [-p PORT] <presentation> [<targetdir>]
Positional arguments:
<presentation>
- The path to the reStructuredText presentation file.
<targetdir>
- The directory where the presentation is saved. Will be created if it does not exist. If you do not specify a targetdir Hovercraft! will instead start a webserver and serve the presentation from that server.
Optional arguments:
-h, --help
- Show this help.
-t TEMPLATE, --template TEMPLATE
- Specify a template. Must be a .cfg file, or a directory with a
template.cfg
file. If not given it will use a default template.-c CSS, --css CSS
- An additional CSS file for the presentation to use. See also the
:css:
settings of the presentation.-a, --auto-console
- Open the presenter console automatically. This is useful when you are rehearsing and making sure the presenter notes are correct. You can also set this by having
:auto-console: true
first in the presentation.-s, --skip-help
- Do not show the initial help popup.
--n, --skip-notes
- Do not include presenter notes in the output.
-p PORT, --port PORT
- The address and port that the server uses. Ex 8080 or 127.0.0.1:9000. Defaults to 0.0.0.0:8000.
Built in templates¶
There are two templates that come with Hovercraft! One is called default
and will be used unless you specify a template. This is the template you will
use most of the time.
The second is called simple
and it doesn’t have a presenter console. This
template is especially useful if you combine it with the --skip-notes
parameter to prepare a version of your presentation to be put online.