Feature request: preview only current slide?

[rodrigo-j-goncalves]

When preparing a presentation, a simple (and, I assume, rather typical) workflow would be something like:

1- Edit a slide
2- Test (ie preview its animations, check errors, layout, etc.)
3- Go to the next/previous slide, to check the transitions
4- Advance to a new slide and start again at 1-

When the presentation has several slides (eg. 70), the preview becomes a real bottleneck in terms of time because in order to see the current slide you ask quarto to render all the presentation. (here I am assuming that the time it takes to render a presentation of 87 slides is much longer than the time it takes to render 1-3 slides, and the more slides the longer it takes. If this assumption is wrong then this message can be disregarded).

Also, when you have already finished all the previous slides, you normally don't really intend to see them again every time you save (to inspect the current slide). Therefore it would help a lot if the user could chose if she/he wants to render only the current slide or the whole presentation*

Is there a way to configure the VSC plugin to only render the current (or say, the previous + the current + the next) slide only?
If not, would it make sense to turn this into a feature request?

• Actually, since preview is named as just a preview, I would expect that it shows only what you're doing now and it's optimized for speed (ideally, real-time). And let render do the more serious, complete job.

Thanks so much for this great software.

[axiomtutor]

I second the request! I've been having the same issue. But I wonder if a work-around might be to put the slide number in the url or something like that? Maybe then when it reloads, it reloads the specific slide number that it was on? I might try fiddling with that myself, but if anyone else knows more about how this works, they might know how to make the idea work. 🤷