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Export to PDF or PPTX

Hand out your deck, upload it to a conference platform, or drop it into a PowerPoint agenda.

slidesk export my-talk               # my-talk.pdf
slidesk export -t pptx my-talk       # my-talk.pptx

The output file is named after the TITLE of your slidesk.toml (slugified), or after the talk directory. Override it with -o:

slidesk export -o build/deck.pdf my-talk

Install a browser

Exporting needs a Chromium-based browser: SliDesk starts it headless and drives it over the DevTools Protocol. Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Brave and Vivaldi are found automatically. Nothing is downloaded and no extra dependency is installed.

If your browser lives somewhere unusual — or in CI:

SLIDESK_CHROME=/usr/bin/chromium slidesk export my-talk

In a GitHub Actions job:

- run: sudo apt-get install -y chromium-browser
- run: bunx slidesk export -t pdf my-talk

PDF or PPTX?

pdf pptx
Slide rendering vectorial 1920x1080 image
Selectable text yes no
Speaker notes no yes
File size small a few MB
Editable afterwards no slide order and notes

Pick pdf to share or archive a deck, pptx when someone asks for "the PowerPoint".

Language versions

Export the version you need with -l, like when presenting:

slidesk export -l fr my-talk -o deck-fr.pdf
slidesk export -l en my-talk -o deck-en.pdf

What does not survive the export

Both formats walk the deck slide by slide, so plugin onSlideChange hooks run for every slide and whatever they render ends up in the export. What gets lost:

  • transitions between slides are dropped,
  • step-by-step reveals (@gouz/steps) are captured at their first step, not unrolled into one page per step,
  • anything driven by interaction is frozen in its initial state.

One case the PDF cannot cover: a slide holding an <iframe> keeps the frame it loaded and is never rebuilt, because an iframe re-created at print time would come out blank. If a plugin renders into such a slide and tears it down when you leave, only the last visited one keeps its content. Export that deck as PPTX, which captures every slide while it is on screen.

Speaker notes

Your /* ... */ notes land in the notes pane of the PPTX, one PowerPoint note per slide — slides without notes get none. Notes are exported as plain text: formatting is dropped, list items keep a • marker, and blank lines are preserved.

The PDF carries no notes: use the speaker view (slidesk -n) to present with them.