Giving technical presentations is a worthwhile and satisfying endeavour, but producing a quality slide deck can be a frustrating and time consuming activity. It needn't be.

In this talk I will show you my slide toolchain which, in brief, turns ReStructuredText (a lightweight markup format) into a PDF via Pandoc (a "universal document converter" written in Haskell), allowing me to focus on the structure and content of my presentations and not worry about formatting.

We will cover basic formatting, math, code, images, Unicode, foreign scripts, slide appearance and themes, and how to escape from ReST and access the full power of LaTeX when needed. There will also be a brief detour into Pandoc internals and a discussion of ways to vary the toolchain for alternative markup language preferences or output formats.