The Post Is the Slide Deck

This one is a bit of an experiment. A blog post and a short talk are often the same material, just delivered differently, and people take things in differently too: some will read a post, some would rather sit through a handful of slides. I wanted to see whether one document could be pulled into more than one medium without any significant rewriting. colophon can now do exactly that: a post projects itself into a themed deck, published at /<slug>/slides/ and linked from its Downloads box, with the deck derived from the post rather than maintained beside it. This post is one: open the Slides link and present it.

• The same material, read or presented
• No second copy to keep in sync
• The deck updates when the post does

# colophon.yaml: the site default (off, here)
slides:
  enabled: false

# any post: opt in, in the frontmatter
slides: true

flowchart LR
  P["The post"] --> S["Headings: slides"]
  P --> N["Prose: presenter notes"]
  P --> B["Code, images, tables, maths, diagrams: on the slide"]

• Headings split the deck into slides
• Paragraphs drop into the presenter notes
• Everything else stays on the slide: code, images, tables, maths, diagrams, callouts, pull-quotes

slides:
  enabled: true
  split: [h2]        # h2 opens a slide; h3 and deeper fold into bullets

• Heading levels: h1 through h6
• Structural: hr, splitslide
• Block kinds: image, table, code, math, diagram, audio, video
• text:<match>: break before a block whose text starts with the match

• <splitslide> forces a break mid-section
• <slide>…</slide> makes one verbatim slide
• <noslide>…</noslide> keeps content in the post but out of the deck

• ← / → or swipe to move
• P presenter notes, F fullscreen
• Enter plays the slide's media, Esc closes the deck

environments:
  - name: preview
    slides: { enabled: true }    # decks on while I'm drafting
  - name: production
    # inherits the site default (off)