HACKER Q&A
📣 breck

Plain text languages that compile to slideshows or movies?


I'm working on a new language for data journalists building timeline/movie stories like these: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/video/russia-ukraine-bucha-massacre-takeaways.html

Has anyone seen any hand written DSLs that compile to a movie file, powerpoint, HTML presentation, et cetera?

I want to allow people to make movies by hand first, rather than by a GUI tool like iMovie or PowerPoint (though building a GUI for these files will be very easy later on).

Here'a snippet of my work in progress (that generates a javascript/html/css presentation):

    clear
    
    0 * audio walking.mpeg
    
    0 3 overlay This video includes scences of graphic violenece from the outset.
    
    0 * video walking.mpeg
    
    15.1 * audio someOfMost.mp4
    
    20 * video birdsEye.mpeg
    
    * * video scene1.mpeg
    * * video scene2.mpeg
    * * video scene3.mpeg
    * * video scene4.mpeg
    * * video scene5.mpeg
    * * video scene6.mpeg
    
    clear

  👤 elviejo Accepted Answer ✓
Look at: https://lang.video

Video is a language for making movies. It combines the power of a traditional video editor with the capabilities of a full programming language. Video integrates with the Racket ecosystem and extensions for DrRacket to transform it into a non-linear video editor.

👤 Tomte
https://pandoc.org/

Lots of markup languages (Markdown, AsciiDoc,Wiki Markup) to Powerpoint, Libre Office and many more.

Otherwise take a look at Inform 7 or Ink, both on the front page a day or two ago.

👤 vivegi
FFmpeg can do most of this particularly for combining audio/video/subtitles and transcoding to various output video formats.

https://ffmpeg.org/

👤 tornadofart
With LaTeX this is partly possible, there is a format for slides.