Show HN: I built a tool to fix academic slide decks so I could study

1 tomjurien 0 5/1/2025, 4:06:29 PM life-is-too-short-for-slides.app ↗
Hi HN,

I’m a CS undergrad and I’ve been taking notes in LaTeX for the past two years. It helped me understand things better, but it took way too much time. I couldn’t keep up anymore.

A few weeks ago, midterms hit. I had over 1000 slides to go through. Most of my professors just upload massive decks with hundreds of sparse slides. No structure, no flow, just endless bullet points. Studying from that was a mess.

What annoyed me most is that everyone keeps building tools to summarize the slides. But that doesn’t fix the problem. I don’t want less information. I just want to read it like a real document, print it and annotate it.

So I built something to help myself. It’s called Life is Too Short for Slides. You upload your PDF and it gives you a clean, readable PDF with structure and spacing. No content is removed. It just becomes easier to follow.

The first 15 slides are free. No account needed.

Try it here: https://life-is-too-short-for-slides.app

Quick 30-second demo: https://youtu.be/h0CQKIRLMBM

I made this during midterms to catch up. Then a few friends started using it, so I turned it into a SaaS (so it wouldn't cost me money and people could use it by themselves). Would love feedback on the experience, pricing, and even potential use cases beyond school.

Happy to answer questions or talk through the tech behind it.

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