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

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