mdeck

Beautiful PDF slide decks from Markdown. No LaTeX knowledge required.

Write your talk in plain Markdown, run one command, get a professional-looking presentation — powered by Beamer and the Metropolis theme, which is bundled so you don't have to install anything extra.

mdeck talk.md --open

---

Get started in 2 minutes

1. Install dependencies

brew install pandoc
brew install --cask mactex   # or any TeX distribution with LuaLaTeX

2. Install mdeck

pipx install mdeck

3. Write your talk

---
title: "My Talk"
author: Jane Doe
date: "June 2025"
theme: metropolis
---

# Motivation

Why this problem matters.

# Approach

- Key idea one
- Key idea two

# Results

Lorem ipsum.

4. Build

mdeck talk.md --open

That's it. No \begin{frame}, no preamble, no .cls files to hunt down.

---

How it works

Each # Heading in your Markdown becomes a slide. Everything else is standard Markdown: bullet lists, bold, italics, code blocks, images. Under the hood, mdeck calls pandoc with the right flags so you never have to.

---

Customisation

Options can go in the file's YAML frontmatter, on the command line, or both. CLI flags always win.

Frontmatter

Key	Default	Values
theme	(beamer default)	Any Beamer theme; metropolis is bundled
aspectratio	169	43 169 1610 149 54 32
pdf-engine	lualatex	lualatex xelatex pdflatex
mainfont	—	Any font name (LuaLaTeX/XeLaTeX only)
title / author / date	—	Free text

CLI

mdeck [OPTIONS] FILE

  -o, --output PATH               Output PDF path  (default: FILE.pdf)
  --theme TEXT                    Beamer theme
  --aspectratio [43|169|1610|...]  Slide aspect ratio
  --pdf-engine TEXT               PDF engine
  --open                          Open the PDF after building
  --version                       Show version
  --help                          Show help