impress.js
impress.js is a presentation framework written in JavaScript that uses the power of CSS3 transitions and transforms. It is inspired by the idea behind prezi.com
WARNING
impress.js may not help you if you have nothing interesting to say ;)
THIS VERSION IS UNSTABLE AND INCOMPLETE. Please use the upstream version (V2.0.0)!
A rewrite of this README file is also ongoing, therefore it also contains comments and some unfinished sections, as well as the fact that it looks kinda awful with the partial changes that I have made so far.
We are also switching to TS as the main impress development language, but you can still develop plugins in JS, if you wish!
Getting Started with impress.js
Welcome to impress.js, the impressive JavaScript framework, that allows you to build presentations for web browsers.
Browser support
Since impress.js is designed to show of the power of modern CSS, we cannot guarantee that it will run in older browser. Whilst we try not to intentionally not support browsers, some features might not work well on all browsers, especially with V3.x. For example, Internet Explorer is known to not work with V3.x, so if you really NEED to use that browser, please use V2.x. impress.js works best with the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and most likely also with the latest versions of Safari.
Quick Start
You can visit our website at https://impress.js.org to learn more about the project, where you can also find helpful resources for getting started, like the Getting Started Guide and Documentation, but rendered as HTML instead of MarkDown, as it is here on GitHub.
A very quick quick start
Copy one of the code snippets below to the header of your impress.js presentation's HTML file.
- V3.0.0:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/impress/impress.js@3.0.0/dist/impress.min.js"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/impress/impress.js@3.0.0/dist/impress.min.css"
- V2.0.0:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/impress/impress.js@2.0.0/js/impress.js"/>
- V1.1.0:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/impress/impress.js@1.1.0/js/impress.js"/>
- Upstream:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/impress/impress.js/dist/impress.min.js"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/impress/impress.js/dist/impress.min.css"
We do not recommend using the Upstream version, as there might be breaking changes coming or features might be temporarily broken due to only partially finished feature updates. Whilst this shouldn't happen normally, please be aware of that risk when using Upstream.
Using a self-hosted version of impress.js
You can download impress.js from the releases tab. Some older versions might not have the impress.js file in the releases, you will be required to extract it from the source code archive. You can find the file in the js folder. New versions include the impress.js, impress.min.js, impress.css and impress.min.css files in the assets.
Documentation
You can find the entire documentation of impress.js on our website or in the DOCUMENTATION.md file
The HTML source code of the official impress.js demo serves as a good example usage and contains comments explaining various features of impress.js. For more information about styling you can look into CSS code which shows how classes provided by impress.js can be used. Last but not least JavaScript code of impress.js has some useful comments if you are interested in how everything works. Feel free to explore!
Official demo
Examples and demos
The Classic Slides demo is targeted towards beginners, or can be used as a template for presentations that look like the traditional PowerPoint slide deck. Over time, it also grew into the example presentation that uses most of the features and addons available.
More examples and demos can be found on Examples and demos wiki page.
Feel free to add your own example presentations (or websites) there.
Other tutorials and learning resources
If you want to learn even more there is a list of tutorials and other learning resources on the wiki, too.
There is also a book available about Building impressive presentations with impress.js by Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake.
You may want to check out the sibling project Impressionist: a 3D GUI editor that can help you in creating impress.js presentations.
Mailing list
You're welcome to ask impress.js related questions on the impressionist-presentations mailing list.
TODO: We should migrate to a different kind of mailing list
Contributing
Cloning impress.js locally
git clone --recursive https://github.com/impress/impress.js.git
cd impress.js
Note: For a minimal checkout, omit the --recursive option. This will leave out extra plugins.
Details
For developers, once you've made changes to the code, you should run these commands for testing:
npm install
npm run all
Note that running firefox qunit_test_runner.html is usually more informative than running karma with npm run test. They both run the same tests.
More info about the src/ directory can be found in src/plugins/README.md.
Requirements
TODO: Check that these requirements are still ok
- >= node 7.6
- npm
REPOSITORY STRUCTURE
- index.html: This is the official impress.js demo, showcasing all of the features of the original impress.js, as well as some new plugins as we add them.
- As already mentioned, this file is well commented and acts as the official tutorial.
- examples/: Contains several demos showcasing additional features available.
- Classic Slides is a simple demo that you can use as template if you want to create very simple, rectangular, PowerPoint-like presentations.
- src/: The main file is src/impress.js. Additional functionality is implemented as plugins in src/plugins/.
- See src/plugins/README.md for information about the plugin API and how to write plugins.
- test/: Contains QUnit and Syn libraries that we use for writing tests, as well as some test coverage for core functionality. (Yes, more tests are much welcome.) Tests for plugins are in the directory of each plugin.
- js/: Contains js/impress.js, which contains a concatenation of the core
src/impress.jsand all the plugins. Traditionally this is the file that you'll link to in a browser. In fact both the demo and test files do exactly that. - css/: Contains a CSS file used by the demo. This file is not required for using impress.js in your own presentations. Impress.js creates the CSS it needs dynamically.
- extras/ contains plugins that for various reasons aren't enabled by default. You have to explicitly add them with their own
scriptelement to use them. - build.js: Simple build file that creates
js/impress.js. It also creates a minified versionimpress.min.js, but that one is not included in the github repository. - package.json: An NPM package specification. This was mainly added so you can easily install buildify and run
node build.js. Other than the build process, which is really just doing roughlycat src/impress.js src/plugins/*/*.js > js/impress.js, and testing,impress.jsitself doesn't depend on Node or any NPM modules.
About impress.js
ABOUT THE NAME
impress.js name is courtesy of @skuzniak.
It's an (un)fortunate coincidence that an Open/LibreOffice presentation tool is called Impress ;)
Reference API
See the Reference API
Browser support (again, but for devs)
impress.js uses the following CSS and JavaScript features
Copyright and License
Copyright 2011-2012 Bartek Szopka (@bartaz), 2016-2023 Henrik Ingo (@henrikingo) and 85+ other contributors
Released under the MIT License