Converting a Reveal.js slide deck to PDF

Something I have to do every so often is convert one of my talks from their web form in Reveal.js to a PDF.

Ahead of speaking at DTX London tomorrow, I'm preparing a PDF as well as the web URL, and I've yet again forgotten how to do it, as it's just-infrequent-enough that I've not got it in my memory banks.

This is the perfect opportunity to write it as a form of blogumentation, so next time I don't have to try and remember!

We can use the excellent Decktape project to do the hard work.

To do so, we need to install decktape, which I prefer to do in a temporary directory, as it's so infrequently used it doesn't make sense to be a globally installed tool.

From there, we can run:

# NOTE that the URL and output filename may want to change
npm exec decktape reveal --fragments http://localhost:1313/dmd-dtx/slides/ dmd-dtx.pdf

Note that --fragments is required to handle Reveal.js' fragments (aka in-slide transitions) and will create a new page on the PDF per fragment.