Why Serengeti

A presentation is an optimization problem

A presentation, scientific or not, is an optimization problem. It has an objective, variables and constraints.

The objective is to maximize knowledge transfer to your audience. The variables are what you show on your slides and what you say out loud. The constraints are the time you have and the space on the projector. A good presenter uses both wisely.

The tools we use decide how many of those variables we can actually control.

Tools shape how science is communicated

Document preparation tools matter more than we think. They shape how scientists communicate discovery, whether on the web, in print, or in a talk.

Edward Tufte, Professor Emeritus at Yale, has argued this for years. He holds that tools like PowerPoint lack the expressive power to convey a technical message. His best known example comes from the Space Shuttle Columbia investigation. A Boeing slide buried a crucial detail deep inside nested bullet points. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board cited his analysis in its final report.

It is no surprise, then, that many academics never left LaTeX, despite many dedicated presentation software.

Unlike commercial tools, LaTeX is a document preparation ecosystem from academics, for academics. When we use a LaTeX package written by another academic, we walk a path someone like us has already cleared, and build on the solution they left behind.

PDF is consistent, but static

LaTeX documents usually compile to PDF, a format that descends from Adobe's PostScript. Adobe built PostScript so a document would look the same on every device, and for years it was the language printers spoke. If you remember "PostScript-compatible printers," you're not imagining it.

PDF inherited that promise. It describes every page exactly and embeds its fonts, so nothing shifts from one machine to the next. Outside Adobe, few people have shaped this world. Among them are Donald Knuth, who created TeX; Leslie Lamport, who built LaTeX on top of it; and Hàn Thế Thành, whose pdfTeX let TeX produce PDF directly.

That consistency has a cost. LaTeX can reveal bullet points one at a time, but a figure in a PDF is frozen. Your audience can't hover over a data point, zoom into a region, or toggle a series on and off.

What Serengeti offers

As Alan Kay put it, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Serengeti is our attempt.

Interactive plots inside your document

Serengeti extends PDF with embeddable JavaScript plots. We already have excellent plotting libraries, like Plotly.js. Putting them inside a LaTeX document or presentation should be an option available to every presenter.

Serengeti lets you attach JavaScript plotting libraries to your document via LaTeX commands, then place an \interactivefigure anywhere you choose. Your interactive figures come alive in Serengeti Desktop, our dedicated presenter app for LaTeX PDFs.

Typography matters

Type designers rarely receive the attention they deserve. Many people in the LaTeX ecosystem also gave academia its typefaces. Donald Knuth didn't just write TeX; he designed Computer Modern, the typeface much of academia still reads in.

Typefaces have real consequences. Clearview was designed to make US highway signs easier to read at speed and at night. Yet in scientific talks, typography is often an afterthought. Illegible fonts and unreadable font sizes are still common.

The free typefaces of the TeX world are a gift, and Serengeti builds on them. Our upcoming collection of premium LaTeX templates pairs the best of that work with layouts and type sizes designed for the projector, right in Serengeti Editor.

Where this comes from

My journey as a researcher began in fall 2017, when I started my PhD at the University of Illinois Chicago. Over the years I attended many talks, at UIC and at institutes across the Chicago area, and watched presentations from many perspectives.

After the pandemic, I was deep in my doctoral work on the theory of deep learning, with numerical optimization as a hobby. Then something unusual caught my attention: document preparation tools. I soon learned I wasn't alone. Tufte had spent a lot of time on the same question, and I found myself echoing much of what he had felt, written and said.

Serengeti is what nearly a decade of watching scientific talks turned into.

What's behind the name?

The name Serengeti is about as arbitrary as the name Python, which is named after Monty Python. It was chosen simply because I liked the sound of it.

That being said, if you've heard that 1982 song, you already know the Serengeti plains of Africa. The name comes from a Maasai word meaning "endless plains," and the Serengeti is home to one of the richest ecosystems on Earth. That's the kind of richness we want to bring to your document preparation ecosystem.

Join us

Serengeti is currently invite-only. To request access, email us at hello@getserengeti.com.

Usama Muneeb
Founder, Serengeti