Presentations & decks

Any page can be a slide deck instead of a document — the whole page becomes a presentation, designed for you. You write plain markdown; tela handles typography, layout, and color. A page is either a doc or a deck, never slides mid-document.

Make a deck

A page becomes a deck when its deck page property is true. The easiest way is to ask an AI agent — "turn this into a presentation," or "make me a short slide deck about X" — which sets the property and writes the slides for you (see [[Agents & MCP]]). Agents, the API, and sync all set it the same way.

A deck's body is Slidev markdown: write each slide as markdown, separated by a --- on its own line. The first lines of a slide can set a layout and its fields; the rest is normal markdown.

---
layout: cover
title: Shipping Faster
subtitle: How we cut p95 80%
---

---
layout: default
title: The problem
---

- Average round trip was 220ms
- p95 hit 480ms

You don't write CSS or design anything — each slide picks a layout that fits its content (a title cover, a definition, a row of big numbers, a before/after table, a chart, a process, an image hero, a quote, …) and fills in the fields. The design system does the rest.

[!TIP] Not sure how to lay out a slide? Ask an AI agent — "make me a short slide presentation about X" — and it builds a real, styled deck for you, and can even generate or polish on-brand images for it (see [[Agents & MCP]]). One idea per slide reads best.

Style it — variants

A deck's default view shows its slide count, a Present button, export options, and a variant picker (the 🎨 menu). The variant sets the whole look — typeface, color scheme, texture, density. It's a deliberate choice, not a default: pick the one that fits this deck's topic and tone (a brand-new deck prompts you to choose a style). Switching restyles the whole deck instantly — no rebuild.

There's a dozen-plus to choose from, each tuned to a tone — Editorial (refined serif), Brutalist (mono, blueprint grid, for technical talks), Soft (rounded, friendly), Minimal (Swiss whitespace), Boardroom (navy, data-forward for sales/finance), Poster (oversized condensed headlines), and more. Open the 🎨 menu to see the current set with a one-line "best for" on each; switch anytime.

Brand it

Decks created in an organization's space pick up that org's brand automatically — your logo on the opening/closing slides (and as a small footer mark) and your brand accent color across the whole palette. Set it once in organization settings → Branding; every deck in the org inherits it with no per-deck work. Branding is the logo and color, not the style — so the variant stays a per-deck choice, and your decks look consistently yours without all looking the same. A specific deck can still override the accent or logo if it needs to.

Present

Click Present to open the live presentation in a new tab — the real thing, not a slideshow of images:

Navigate with ← / → or space; F for fullscreen.
Presenter view — your speaker notes + a preview of the next slide on one screen, plus a clock and synced navigation (open it from the toolbar).
Slide overview — press O to see every slide as a grid and jump anywhere.
Draw on slides — annotate live with the pen tools.
Click-through builds — step-by-step reveals animate as you advance.

It opens same-origin, so your tela login carries your access — only people who can read the page can present it.

Edit

Editing a deck gives you a focused plain-markdown editor (so nothing mangles the slide syntax) beside a live slide outline listing every slide, its title, and its layout as you type.

The outline also checks your deck while you write and flags anything wrong above the slide list:

Errors (red) — the deck won't build or a slide won't render: an unknown layout, a missing required field, a broken Mermaid diagram, a stray ---, a quoting mistake in a component. Presenting will fail until you fix these.
Warnings (amber) — it'll render, but it'll read poorly: too many bullets on one slide, a bullet that's really a paragraph, the same layout three times in a row.

Each issue names the slide it's on; hover for the full message when it's long. Nothing here blocks saving — it's advice while you type, so you find a problem at the keystroke that caused it rather than when you hit Present. AI agents get the same checks, but stricter: an agent isn't allowed to save a deck with errors in it.

Export

From the deck view's export menu you can download a deck three ways:

PDF — handouts, sharing. A real, per-slide deck (one slide per page, exactly as it presents), never a document-style dump of the source. You can also Export PDF from any page's ••• menu.
PowerPoint (.pptx) — editable slides in Keynote / PowerPoint / Google Slides.
Slidev source (.md) — the raw slide markdown, ready to run in your own Slidev with slidev slides.md. This is the deck's portable source: the same markdown tela stores, so you own it and can version it, edit it offline, or take it elsewhere. The tela look comes from the slidev-theme-tahta theme (on npm) — install it in your Slidev project to reproduce the styling.

PDF and PPTX render each slide as a true frame, so they take a few seconds — a progress toast shows while it works and your download starts when it's ready. Click-through builds are flattened to their final state. The .md export is instant. Sharing a deck by link works the same — adding it as a PDF download gives the proper slides, not the markdown.

Speaker notes

Add notes to a slide with an HTML comment at the end of the slide — they show in presenter view, not on the slide:

---
layout: default
title: The rollout
---

- Phase 1: shadow traffic
- Phase 2: 5% canary

<!--
Stress that phase 2 ran for a full week before ramping.
-->

[!TIP] Want a worked example? The [[Tela — Team Onboarding]] deck is built entirely with these layouts and variants — open it and hit Edit to see the markdown behind each slide.