Showcasing Clinical and Translational Research Presentations with Hugo Academic

Author

David M. Miller, Sophia Z. Shalhout

Published

January 12, 2020

Abstract

This working document is a user guide on how to post presentations on your a website using the packages blogdown, Hugo Academic and pdftools

Overview

This working document is a user guide on how to enhance communication of Clinical and Translational Research by posting slides of your presentations and talks on your website using blogdown and Hugo Academic
Hugo Academic combined with blogdown allows for the ability to host slides of your talks so viewers can follow along with your during your presentation or have as a repository for later reference
- This also allows you to retain your slides and not be put in the uncomfortable position of “giving away” your precious slides that you spent countless hours on
- In particular we will focus on a pearl on how to fairly straightforwardly transform your powerpoint or pdf talk into images so they can be hosted on your Hugo Academic Website using a nice package called pdftools

Initial Steps

We are going to assume that you’ve already built your website using blogdown and Hugo Academic
If you have not, please see our post Communicating CT Research via Website Development with R

First create a folder for your slides for the particular talk you want to post

Within your main webstie working directory
- Click through content -> slides
- In the slides folder create a new folder that is specific for the slides your intended folder
- In that folder you will then create an index.md markdown file which will control the content of your slides
- I would also recommend creating another folder in that folder where you can store images of slides from your powerpoint presentation or pdf presentation
  - I make one and call it slides but you can call it whatever you want

Creating content in the `index.md` markdown

The YAML in that index can look like this:

authors:
- David M. Miller
categories: []
date: “2019-12-09T00:00:00Z”

highlight_style: dracula theme: black
abstract: Slides for ODAC Melanoma Talk 1-18-2020.
tags:
- Melanoma
- Dermatology
- Medical Oncology
title: Therapeutic Updates in Melanoma - IO for Earlier Stage Disease

Underneath the YAML, you will build the content of your slides

Each set of slides will be seprated by two three dash segments such as:

You can create any content you want in these slides such as:

That will create slides that look like this:

Using your actual slides from powerpoint or pdf as slides on your website

Instead of creating your slides for your website manually using Hugo Academic or blogdown you can make images of your powerpoint files and use them as a backdrop (which is my preference)
This can produce really nice looking slides, but it can be a bit labor intensive
One approach is to print your slides in powerpoint to pdf format and then convert each slide to a single pdf or jpg file and put those files in you slides folder that you created
But doing this slide by slide is quite tedious
- Enter a slick Data Science Solution
  - Make use of a wonderful package called pdftools
    - this allows you to convert one to all of your pdf slides to a variety of image types
pdftoolswill greatly reduce your work load

Let’s use an example from one of our presentations

In January, we had a powerpoint presentation on IO therapy in earlier stage melanoma
After creating the powerpoint presentation we printed the ppt to pdf
- That pdf was titled melanoma_odac.pdf
  - To faciliate the creation of the slide presentation using blogdown we made use of the pdftools package as follows:

Load the pdftools package

library(pdftools)

Convert PDF to JPEG
- Use the following code for this:
pdf_convert("melanoma_odac.pdf", format = "jpeg", pages = NULL, filenames = NULL, dpi = 300, opw = "", upw = "", verbose = TRUE)

Of note, melanoma_odac.pdf is the name of the pdf that you want to convert slide by slide to jpeg, this file should be in the same working directory as the Rproject that you are working with
- Once you execute this function, each slide will be converted into the image format of your choosing -> in this case we chose jpeg
  - This is important, b/c it should match the code in your index.md markdown for your slides presentation
  - Each slide will be automatically labeled as melanoma_odac_1.jpeg followed by melanoma_odac_2.jpeg, etc.

Important nuances of the code

pages = NULL will convert all of the slides to individual slide
dpi = 300 is the resolution of the images that you are saving

Format your `index.md` appropriately

Then, if you want your jpeg slides to take up the whole entire slide, make them a backdrop
Here is an example of what Dr. Miller’s index.md file looked like
To see how this turns out click here