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 its 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] [-j JS] [-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.
-j JS, --js JS
An additional Javascript file for the presentation to use. Added as a js-body script. See also the :js-body: 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. You can also set this by having :skip-help: true first in the presentation.
-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.
--mathjax MATHJAX
The URL to the mathjax library. (It will only be used if you have rST math:: in your document)
-N, --slide-numbers
Show the current slide number on the slide itself and in the presenter console. You can also set this by having slide-numbers: true in the presentation preamble.
-v, --version
Show program’s version number and exit

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 right now it only lacks the Goto function. You can ignore it.