How to turn Markdown into a slide deck
Write a presentation as plain text and let slide breaks do the layout — the conventions that turn Markdown into slides, and why it beats fighting with a slide editor.
Slide editors make you think about boxes and alignment before you've decided what to say. Writing slides in Markdown flips that: you draft the content as text, and Markdown to Slides splits it into a deck.
The one convention that matters: slide breaks
A horizontal rule — three dashes on their own line — marks the boundary between slides:
# Title slide
The big idea in one line
---
## Point one
- Supporting bullet
- Another bullet
---
## Point two
> A quote that lands
Everything between two --- lines becomes one slide. That's the whole model. A heading becomes the slide title; bullets, quotes, and code blocks become the body.
Why this is faster
- You outline and present in the same file. The structure of your talk is the document.
- Reordering is cut-and-paste, not dragging thumbnails.
- It's diffable and portable — keep the deck in Git, review changes, reuse slides across talks.
- No accidental design drift — every slide inherits one consistent style instead of each one becoming a little art project.
Keep slides sparse
The format gently enforces good habits. If a slide's Markdown is getting long, that's a signal to split it — add a --- and continue. Aim for one idea per slide and a handful of bullets at most. The audience reads a wall of text instead of listening to you; a sparse slide keeps their attention on what you're saying.
A workflow that sticks
Draft the talk top to bottom as one Markdown document, inserting --- wherever you'd click "new slide." Read it through as prose first — if it flows as an outline, it'll work as a deck. Then convert, present, and keep the Markdown as the canonical version you'll revise for next time.
Stop wrestling with text boxes. Write the talk, break it into slides, present.