MD-Slides

Markdown to HTML presentations — structured, validated, and speaker-ready.

Try the live demo — open it on your phone too. It's the feature tour below, rendered with the latest release.

MD-Slides converts structured Markdown files into self-contained HTML presentations with keyboard, clicker, and touch navigation, speaker view, syntax-highlighted code blocks, and a flexible theme system. Write slides in plain text; present anywhere a browser runs, including a phone or tablet.

Quick start

Requirements: Java 11 or higher.

# Download the JAR and the feature tour (a 51-slide tutorial of every feature)
curl -L https://github.com/TJMSolns/MD-Slides/releases/latest/download/md-slides.jar -o md-slides.jar
curl -L https://github.com/TJMSolns/MD-Slides/releases/latest/download/feature-tour.md -o feature-tour.md

# Render and open
java -jar md-slides.jar render feature-tour --theme dark
open feature-tour/index.html          # macOS
xdg-open feature-tour/index.html     # Linux
start feature-tour/index.html         # Windows

Press S to open speaker view — every slide in the feature tour has speaker notes. The tour uses every feature, and each feature slide has a Try it step, so it doubles as a tutorial. It's the fastest way to see what MD-Slides can do.

Writing your own slides

java -jar md-slides.jar render my-talk --theme light

my-talk/ is a self-contained output folder — index.html, speaker.html, support scripts and copied images. See Writing Slides for the full format.

What MD-Slides does

• Six templates — title, content, section-title, two-column, diagram, closing — each with enforced layout and density constraints
• Validated — all structure, density, and accessibility errors collected and reported together in one pass
• Speaker-ready — speaker view with notes, the next slide's heading and an elapsed timer, kept in step with the presentation
• Keyboard, clicker, and touch navigation — arrows, Page Up/Down, swipe and tap, break mode, goto, history, timer controls, and #N links to any slide
• Fits any screen — slides scale to fit laptops, projectors, phones, and tablets; wide tables re-wrap instead of overflowing
• Session analytics — press L to save a session log; report shows time per slide, breaks and the path you took
• Themeable — built-in light and dark themes; custom themes via JSON with per-template configuration
• Self-contained output — one folder, works without a server; share by zip, host on GitHub Pages, or print to PDF (one page per slide)
• Zero friction — one JAR, Java 11+. No account, no cloud, no build step for users

Commands

Command	Description
render DECK_NAME [options]	Convert Markdown to HTML
display DECK_NAME	Open the rendered presentation in your browser
report DECK_NAME [--log FILE]	Analyse a saved session log
config	Show active configuration
DECK_NAME	Smart default: show the last session's report, render if needed, open
--help, --version	Show options or the version

There is also an MCP server, mdslides-mcp.jar on the releases page, so an AI assistant can render and check decks (render_deck, validate_deck, list_themes, get_deck_info).