Slide Builder

SlideCraft

A plugin for Claude Code and Claude Cowork that builds PowerPoint presentations from natural language. Describe the deck you want, and Claude generates a YAML content file, builds it into a polished .pptx, and iterates with you until it's right.

No templates to fight with. No dragging boxes around. Just say what you need.

Install

Claude Code (CLI)

Add the plugin marketplace, then install:

/plugin marketplace add jvsteiner/slidecraft
/plugin install slide-builder@slidecraft

Claude Cowork (Desktop)

1. Download or clone this repository
2. Open Claude Desktop and switch to the Cowork tab
3. Click Plugins in the left sidebar
4. Click Upload plugin
5. Select the downloaded plugin folder

The plugin handles its own Python dependency installation on first use.

Usage

Just ask Claude to make a presentation:

"Create a 10-slide pitch deck for a B2B SaaS product called Archway"

"Make a quarterly board update with our key metrics"

"Build a team intro deck with profile cards for our engineering leads"

Claude will write the YAML, pick an appropriate theme, build the .pptx, and hand you the file. You can then ask for changes — swap layouts, adjust colors, rewrite copy — and it rebuilds.

In Claude Code, you can also invoke the skill explicitly with /slide-builder.

---

Themes

6 built-in themes, each with curated fonts, colors, and spacing:

Theme	Style	Best for
Boardroom	White/navy	Corporate, consulting, board decks
Midnight	Dark slate/sky-blue	Technical, dev tools, engineering
Ember	Warm white/burnt orange	Editorial, brand strategy, marketing
Ink	Pure white/red	Minimal, Apple-style, product launches
Canopy	Off-white/forest green	Sustainability, wellness, education
Signal	White/vivid purple	Consumer products, demo day, pitch

Claude picks the theme that fits your content, or you can ask for a specific one.

Theme configuration

Themes are defined in the theme: block of the YAML file:

theme:
  font_display: "Futura"           # Headings, titles, large text
  font_body: "Avenir Next"         # Body text, bullets, captions
  background_image: "images/bg.jpg" # Optional — global background image
  overlay:                          # Optional — overlay on background images
    color: "#000000"
    opacity: 0.4
  colors:
    bg: "#0F172A"                  # Slide background
    surface: "#1E293B"             # Cards, sidebars, table headers
    primary: "#38BDF8"             # Accent color (headings, highlights)
    primary_dark: "#0EA5E9"        # Darker accent variant
    text: "#F8FAFC"               # Primary text
    text_secondary: "#CBD5E1"      # Body text, bullets
    text_muted: "#94A3B8"          # Subtitles, captions
    text_dim: "#64748B"            # Footers, slide numbers
    divider: "#334155"             # Horizontal rules
    row_alt: "#1E293B"             # Alternating table rows
    border: "#475569"              # Card/table borders
    danger: "#F87171"              # Red accent
    success: "#34D399"             # Green accent
    warning: "#FBBF24"            # Yellow accent
  spacing:
    margin: 0.8                    # Outer margin (inches)
    gutter: 0.4                    # Gap between columns (inches)
    margin_top: 0.6                # Top margin for headers
    title_height: 0.8              # Title zone height
    footer_y: 7.0                  # Footer vertical position

---

Background Images

Slides can use an image as the background, configured globally or per-slide.

Global background (all slides)

Set background_image in the theme block. Every slide uses this image unless overridden:

theme:
  background_image: "images/dark-texture.jpg"
  overlay:
    color: "#000000"
    opacity: 0.5

Per-slide override

Individual slides can use a different image, or disable the background entirely:

slides:
  - layout: title
    title: "Welcome"
    background_image: "images/hero-photo.jpg"   # different image for this slide
    overlay:
      color: "#000000"
      opacity: 0.6

  - layout: content
    title: "Details"
    background_image: null                       # no background image, solid color

Overlay

The optional overlay adds a semi-transparent color layer between the background image and slide content, improving text readability over photos. opacity ranges from 0.0 (fully transparent) to 1.0 (fully opaque).

Image paths are relative to the YAML file.

---

Layouts

21 slide layouts covering the patterns you actually use in decks.

Openers and closers

title

Opening slide with large title, optional tagline, subtitle, and footer.

- layout: title
  title: "Voxel"
  tagline: "Infrastructure that disappears."
  subtitle: "Real-time edge compute for the rest of us."
  footer: "voxel.dev  |  Seed Round 2025"
  align: center          # or "left" — defaults to "center"

Key	Type	Required	Description
title	string	yes	Main title (auto-scales font for length)
tagline	string	no	Bold accent-colored line below title
subtitle	string	no	Muted line below tagline
footer	string	no	Small text at slide bottom
align	string	no	"center" (default) or "left"

section

Section divider with large centered text and optional section number.

- layout: section
  number: "01"
  title: "The Problem"
  subtitle: "Why the status quo doesn't work"

Key	Type	Required	Description
number	string	no	Large section number displayed above title
title	string	yes	Section title
subtitle	string	no	Muted subtitle below

closing

Closing slide with CTA, optional bullets, contact info, and tagline.

- layout: closing
  title: "The Ask"
  headline: "Raising $4M seed to build the next compute primitive."
  bullets:
    - "Team: 3 ex-Cloudflare engineers"
    - "Prototype serving 2M req/day in private beta"
  contact:
    email: "founders@voxel.dev"
    url: "voxel.dev"
    social: "@voxel"
  closing: "Let's build the future of compute."

Key	Type	Required	Description
title	string	yes	Main heading
headline	string	no	Bold accent-colored subheading
bullets	list	no	Centered bullet points
contact	dict	no	Contact info: email, url, social
closing	string	no	Small tagline at bottom

Body content

content

Standard body slide with header and text or bullets.

# Plain text
- layout: content
  title: "Our Approach"
  subtitle: "Built from first principles"
  body: "We rethought the entire stack from the ground up..."

# Bullet list
- layout: content
  title: "Key Features"
  body:
    - "Sub-50ms response times globally"
    - "Zero cold starts"
    - "Deploy in seconds"
  variant: bullets       # or "numbered"

Key	Type	Required	Description
title	string	yes	Slide title
subtitle	string	no	Subtitle below title
body	string or list	yes	Plain text (string) or bullet items (list)
variant	string	no	"bullets" (default for lists), "numbered", or "plain"

Two-column layouts

Four layout types with three width variants each:

Layout	Left zone	Right zone
two_col_text_text	text	text
two_col_text_image	text	image
two_col_image_text	image	text
two_col_image_image	image	image

Width variants: Set variant to control column proportions:

Variant	Left	Right
"50_50" (default)	50%	50%
"60_40"	60%	40%
"40_60"	40%	60%

- layout: two_col_text_text
  title: "The Problem"
  variant: "50_50"
  left:
    heading: "What developers want"
    bullets:
      - "Sub-50ms response times"
      - "Zero cold starts"
  right:
    heading: "What they get today"
    bullets:
      - "Lambda cold starts: 200-800ms"
      - "Unpredictable billing"

- layout: two_col_text_image
  title: "The Product"
  variant: "60_40"
  left:
    heading: "Dashboard"
    body: "Real-time monitoring across all regions."
  right: "screenshots/dashboard.png"

Three-column layouts (equal width)

Four layout types with equal-width columns:

Layout	Left	Center	Right
three_col_text_text_text	text	text	text
three_col_text_image_text	text	image	text
three_col_image_text_text	image	text	text
three_col_text_text_image	text	text	image

- layout: three_col_text_text_text
  title: "How It Works"
  left:
    heading: "1. Push"
    body: "Push a container image or point us at your repo."
  center:
    heading: "2. Warm"
    body: "Pre-warms instances in every region where your users live."
  right:
    heading: "3. Serve"
    body: "Requests route to the nearest warm instance."

Three-column layouts (weighted)

Four layout types with a 1/3 + 2/3 split:

Layout	Narrow	Wide
three_col_image_dtext	image (left)	text spanning 2 cols (right)
three_col_text_dimage	text (left)	image spanning 2 cols (right)
three_col_dimage_text	image spanning 2 cols (left)	text (right)
three_col_dtext_image	text spanning 2 cols (left)	image (right)

- layout: three_col_image_dtext
  title: "Case Study"
  left: "photos/client-logo.png"
  right:
    heading: "Results after 6 months"
    bullets:
      - "3x improvement in deploy speed"
      - "60% reduction in infrastructure costs"

Data layouts

comparison

Side-by-side comparison table with optional column highlighting.

- layout: comparison
  title: "How We Compare"
  headers: ["", "Us", "Competitor A", "Competitor B"]
  rows:
    - ["Speed", "<5ms", "200ms", "50ms"]
    - ["Pricing", "$0.01/req", "$0.05/req", "$0.03/req"]
  highlight_column: 1

Key	Type	Required	Description
title	string	yes	Slide title
subtitle	string	no	Subtitle
headers	list	yes	Column headers
rows	list of lists	yes	Table rows
highlight_column	int	no	Column index to bold (0-based)

data_table

Data table with optional sidebar and footer.

- layout: data_table
  title: "Financial Summary"
  table:
    - ["Quarter", "Revenue", "Growth"]
    - ["Q1", "$2.1M", "+12%"]
    - ["Q2", "$2.8M", "+33%"]
  col_widths: [2, 1, 1]
  highlight_row: 2
  sidebar:
    title: "Key Takeaways"
    items:
      - "Revenue up 33% QoQ"
      - "Strongest quarter to date"
  footer: "Source: internal financial data, 2025"

Key	Type	Required	Description
title	string	yes	Slide title
subtitle	string	no	Subtitle
table	list of lists	yes	First row = headers, rest = data
col_widths	list of numbers	no	Relative column widths
highlight_row	int	no	Row index to bold (1-based, 0 = header)
sidebar	dict	no	Side panel: title and items list
footer	string	no	Small text at bottom

metrics

Large hero numbers displayed horizontally (1-4 metrics).

- layout: metrics
  title: "Traction"
  metrics:
    - value: "2M"
      label: "Requests / day"
      context: "Up from 500K in Q1"
    - value: "42"
      label: "Edge regions"
    - value: "<5ms"
      label: "p99 latency"
      context: "Global average"

Key	Type	Required	Description
title	string	yes	Slide title
subtitle	string	no	Subtitle
metrics	list of dicts	yes	Each: value, label, context (optional)

People layouts

profile

Team member or speaker profiles. Renders as a single large card (1 profile) or grid (2-4 profiles).

- layout: profile
  title: "Leadership Team"
  profiles:
    - name: "Alex Chen"
      role: "CEO & Co-founder"
      company: "Previously: Cloudflare"
      bio: "Built Workers KV from scratch. 10 years in distributed systems."
      photo: "photos/alex.jpg"
    - name: "Sam Rivera"
      role: "CTO & Co-founder"
      photo: "photos/sam.jpg"

Key	Type	Required	Description
title	string	yes	Slide title
profiles	list of dicts	yes	Each: name, role, company, bio, photo (all optional except name)

quote

Featured testimonial with optional photo.

- layout: quote
  title: "What Users Say"
  quote: "Voxel cut our deploy times from minutes to seconds. It just works."
  attribution: "Alex Chen"
  role: "CTO, Acme Corp"
  photo: "photos/alex.jpg"

Key	Type	Required	Description
title	string	no	Optional slide title (centers quote if omitted)
quote	string	yes	The quote text
attribution	string	yes	Who said it
role	string	no	Title/company of the person
photo	string	no	Portrait image path

---

Zone content formats

Column layouts use zones for content. Each zone is either text or image.

Text zones

Text zones accept a plain string or a structured dict:

# Simple — renders as a paragraph
left: "This is plain body text."

# Structured — heading + body or bullets
left:
  heading: "Section Title"
  body: "Paragraph text below the heading."

left:
  heading: "Key Points"
  bullets:
    - "First point"
    - "Second point"
    - "Third point"

Image zones

Image zones accept a path string or a dict with caption:

# Simple — just the image
right: "screenshots/dashboard.png"

# With caption
right:
  image: "screenshots/dashboard.png"
  caption: "Real-time monitoring dashboard"

All image paths are relative to the YAML file.

---

How it works under the hood

SlideCraft is a Python library (slidecraft) that generates PPTX files from YAML. The skill teaches Claude how to use it:

1. Claude writes a content.yaml with theme config and slide definitions
2. Runs slidecraft build content.yaml output.pptx
3. Hands you the file
4. Edits the YAML and rebuilds when you ask for changes

The YAML is the source of truth — all content, layout choices, and theming live there.

CLI

# Build a presentation
slidecraft build content.yaml output.pptx

# List all available layouts
slidecraft layouts

Development

If you're working on the skill itself:

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

Key paths:

slidecraft/          # Python library
  builder.py         # YAML → PPTX orchestrator
  theme.py           # Color/font/spacing system
  primitives.py      # Low-level PPTX drawing
  layouts/           # 21 layout implementations
templates/           # 6 pre-built themes (YAML + reference PPTX)
plugins/             # Claude Code skill definition
examples/demo/       # 26-slide showcase deck