Write your talk as Markdown and it becomes a deck as you type. Present it full screen with speaker notes, or download it as PowerPoint, PDF or a single HTML file. Nothing is uploaded.
Slide software makes you fight boxes before you have worked out what you want to say. Writing the talk as plain text keeps you on the argument: a heading, a few points, a line of dashes, the next slide. The layout takes care of itself, and the text shrinks to fit when a slide gets crowded.
| Write | You get |
|---|---|
--- on its own line | A new slide (leave a blank line above it) |
# Title and a line of text | A title slide, in the theme's title colours |
## Section on its own | A section divider |
> A quotation on its own | The quote, set large |
Note: followed by text | Speaker notes, shown only to you |
Front matter: title, author, theme, aspect, footer | Deck settings that travel with the file |
Everything else is ordinary Markdown: lists, numbered lists, bold and italic, links, images, tables and code with syntax highlighting — the same engine as Recto's Markdown editor.
Press Present (or F5) to go full screen. The arrow keys, space bar and a clicker all move between slides; B blanks the screen. Presenter view opens a second window with the current slide, the next one, your notes and a timer — put it on your laptop screen and the full-screen slides on the projector.
Write or open your Markdown, then press PowerPoint. The file is built in your browser with every heading, paragraph, list and table as an editable object, placed where it sits in the preview, and with your speaker notes in the notes pane.
Put three dashes on a line of their own, with a blank line above. Or choose to start a new slide at every # and ## heading instead, which suits documents written as an outline.
Anything after a line starting Note:, Notes: or ??? is a note, as is anything in an HTML comment. Notes appear in the presenter window, which shows the current and next slide and a timer, and they are exported into PowerPoint's notes.
The text shrinks until it fits. A slide that has been shrunk a long way is marked in the strip of thumbnails, as a hint to split it in two.
No. The slides are laid out and every export is built in the page, in your browser. Nothing about your talk is sent to a server.
Yes. Download the HTML deck: it is one file, with the slides, styles and controls inside it, and it presents itself in any browser with the arrow keys, a click or a swipe.
Layouts are picked from the content. A first-level heading with a line or two under it becomes a title slide; a heading on its own, a section divider; a quotation on its own is set large; an image on its own fills the slide. To choose one yourself, add an HTML comment on the slide containing layout: center (or title, section, quote or image).
Open a .md file and read it typeset, or write with source and page side by side, both editable. Tables, task lists, footnotes, find and replace, six colour schemes.
Open the editor →Markdown, Word, EPUB, HTML and plain text, in any direction. Build an ebook or a Word file without handing your document to anyone.
Open the converter →Turn a manuscript into a typeset book: real pages at your trim size, running heads, a contents page with page numbers, and a print-ready PDF or EPUB.
Format a book →See exactly what changed between two versions of a document, word by word, as a redline. Works with Markdown, Word, EPUB and plain text.
Compare documents →Reading grade, Flesch score and five more measures, with long sentences, passive voice and padding highlighted in your own text.
Check readability →Paste CSV, a spreadsheet range or a Markdown table, edit it as a grid, and copy it out as Markdown, CSV, HTML or JSON. Opens .xlsx files too.
Edit a table →Write your CV in Markdown and get a clean, print-ready A4 or Letter page in one of four styles, with a fit-to-one-page control.
Typeset a CV →Open any source file with highlighting and line numbers. Format or minify JSON, XML and CSS, find syntax errors, print it, or copy it with colours.
View code →