Starter Guide

Write Markdown, pour it into your company template (the PowerPoint look and feel), and produce a polished .pptx — this guide walks you through the full SlideCraft flow as the fastest path to a first success. Let's start by taking a single slide all the way to .pptx.

The core idea of SlideCraft is a division of labor: you write the text in Markdown and leave placement and styling to the template and the engine. You get to focus purely on content, without breaking fonts or layouts.

Why SlideCraft

Plenty of tools let you "write slides in Markdown." What makes SlideCraft different is that it inherits your company's slide master as-is and produces real, editable PowerPoint — indistinguishable from something a human made — with the least possible computation.

🎯 Pour into the template, don't break it — Markdown flows into the placeholders of your existing .pptx template. Fonts, colors, layouts, and master decorations stay intact. No wrestling with PowerPoint.
✏️ Not images — editable shapes — Figures, tables, and diagrams are output as native PPTX shapes. Whoever receives the file can tweak them directly in PowerPoint (these are not pasted screenshots).
🧠 A deterministic engine handles placement — Layouts are auto-selected from the template's roles (works with any master), body text is fit within capacity, overflow is automatically split instead of shrinking fonts, and color choices guarantee contrast.
⚡ Minimal computation, guaranteed quality — Because a deterministic engine handles formatting, placement, and validation, all the AI needs to do is write Markdown. That means a small local model is enough, and tokens stay minimal. What's more, the AI's output is validated by an "adoption gate" before it is applied, and the engine guarantees overflow, formatting, and contrast. The design bets on "the harness guaranteeing quality" rather than "betting on a smart model" (harness over model).
👁 Preview = output — The preview, PPTX, and HTML all share the same rendering engine. There's no "the preview looked different from the real thing."
📊 12 native diagram types + Mermaid — Flowcharts, Gantt charts, KPIs, radar charts, and more, from a few lines of YAML as editable shapes.
🔒 Local-first + AI — Desktop plus a built-in offline AI (llamafile). Your data stays with you. You can also drive it from an upstream AI via MCP.

Haven't installed it yet?

Complete the Installation Guide first (Windows .msi / Linux .AppImage and .deb / macOS via Homebrew cask).

The Big Picture — a 4-step flow

SlideCraft's basic cycle has four steps.

Draft — Enter your Markdown.
Turn it into slides — Pick a template, parse the Markdown, and convert it into a deck (a set of slides).
Review and adjust in the visual editor — Check it in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get preview, then add, reorder, and use two-stage editing.
Export — Write out .pptx (PowerPoint) or standalone HTML.

 ┌─────────┐   ┌──────────────┐   ┌───────────────┐   ┌────────────┐
 │ ① Draft │ → │② スライドにする │ → │ ③ 視覚エディタ │ → │ ④ 出力     │
 │ Markdown│   │ +テンプレート │   │ 確認・調整     │   │ PPTX / HTML│
 └─────────┘   └──────────────┘   └───────────────┘   └────────────┘

Markdown (the input) and the deck (the source of truth) hold the same content and can be moved back and forth. Day to day, the visual editor is the main surface, and Markdown is always available for input and export.

① Draft — Write Markdown

When you launch SlideCraft, the first thing you do is prepare a draft in Markdown. For a new deck, start from the Initialize modal; you can also load an existing .md file.

Markdown is interpreted as blocks, one per slide. At a minimum, learning the following is enough to get started.

--- (a horizontal rule) separates one slide
# Heading is the slide's title
Bullet lists (- / * ) and paragraphs are the body

Here's an example you can paste as-is for your very first deck.

markdown

# 2026年 事業計画
> 第2四半期レビュー

Category: 経営会議
Date: 2026-07-07

---

# 今期の3本柱

- 品質 — 不良率を半減
- 速度 — リードタイム短縮
- コスト — 原価 10% 削減

---

# 売上推移

```diagram
type: xychart
nodes: []
xychart:
  xlabel: 四半期
  ylabel: 売上
  categories: [Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4]
  series:
    - { kind: bar, name: "2024", values: [10, 14, 13, 18] }
```

Metadata on the title slide

On the title slide, lines like Category: / Date: / Footer: are treated as metadata. A ## Heading or > Quote becomes the subtitle.

The full picture of the syntax (tables, images, multi-column, KPIs, code fences) is collected in the Markdown Authoring Guide. For the 12 diagram types and the 4 available via mermaid, see Diagrams.

Try the full showcase deck

For a richer example, there's a full showcase deck (~30 slides covering native diagrams, mermaid, tables, multi-column, and every layout). Paste samples/sample-deck.md into Draft and hit "Turn it into slides" to see SlideCraft's full range at once. (This is the sample that used to load on startup through v0.2.0. Its content is in Japanese — feel free to replace the text.)

② Turn it into slides — Pick a template and convert

Once you've written your Markdown, pick a template and run "Turn it into slides." Here's what happens.

The Markdown is parsed and split into individual slides
The engine auto-selects the optimal layout for each slide (auto)
The template's colors, fonts, and layouts are applied

After conversion, you get a WYSIWYG preview with the template's colors and fonts applied as-is. Fonts don't shrink and layouts don't break, because styling is left to the template.

Which template should I choose?

If you have your company's standard .pptx on hand, you can import and use it. A .pptx with broken roles can be repaired on import with "Clean up and import." For a template with an unusual frame structure that doesn't pour in cleanly, use "Import theme only (Re-make)" to inherit just its colors, fonts, and logo. If you're starting from scratch, you can also create a new one by simply choosing a color scheme (a 9-color palette) and fonts. For details, see Templates.

When you want to specify a layout

If you want to use a specific layout rather than leave it to auto-selection, write  on the first line of that slide. Normally you can omit this.

③ Review and adjust in the visual editor

Converting takes you into the visual editor. This is SlideCraft's main surface.

Thumbnail list — Select each slide from the list on the left and review it as-is in the preview on the right
Deck operations — Add, duplicate, and delete slides, and reorder them by dragging
Two-stage editing — Adjust content and design (placement) independently

Editing is split into two layers.

Content = Markdown — Edit the slide's content (headings, bullets, tables, figures) as Markdown, at the granularity of "this whole slide"
Design = spatial intent — Specify placement intent like "text on the left, figure on the right," "emphasize this node," or "change the figure's orientation from vertical to horizontal," and the engine translates it into actual coordinates

These two layers are independent: rewriting the content preserves the design intent, and vice versa. AI can assist with either layer (see the AI Setup Guide). For details on two-stage editing, see Two-Stage Editing and Export.

④ Export — Write out PPTX / HTML

When you're satisfied, export. There are two output targets.

.pptx (PowerPoint) — Figures and tables are output as editable native shapes, so you can tweak them directly in PowerPoint (they are not pasted as images). The template's colors, fonts, and layouts are preserved.
Standalone HTML — A single file with no external dependencies. It supports rich slide transitions and an overview grid, and printing produces one page per slide.

You can save and resume your working state as a .scft project file (the deck plus the template bundled into one file). In the installed version, this extension is associated with the app, so double-clicking a .scft opens it directly in SlideCraft (or as a new tab if the app is already running).

Some Mermaid diagrams can't be turned into PPTX

Mermaid types that can't be converted, such as gitGraph / sankey / C4, can't be drawn in PPTX and are rejected on export (they never disappear silently). Replace them with a supported diagram — one of the 12 diagram types, or a convertible Mermaid type (class / state / ER / mindmap).

If you get stuck

An image shows up as body text — Only data:image/...;base64,... data URIs are rendered as images. Remote URLs and local paths are not, for safety.
A diagram doesn't render — If the YAML/JSON in a diagram fence has a syntax error, it won't render. The editor shows the reason, so check type: and the required fields.
The body overflows — The engine deterministically splits the content across multiple slides. Summarizing or converting to a table also helps.

Other questions are collected in the FAQ.

Starter Guide ​

Why SlideCraft ​

The Big Picture — a 4-step flow ​

① Draft — Write Markdown ​

② Turn it into slides — Pick a template and convert ​

③ Review and adjust in the visual editor ​

④ Export — Write out PPTX / HTML ​

If you get stuck ​

What to read next ​