/quarto — Slide Deck Generator

You have a 48-hour deadline for a lab meeting presentation and you're starting from a pile of notes and paper drafts.

When you need this

• You need a presentation and have background documents (papers, notes, reports, methods drafts) to build from
• You want a structured RevealJS slide deck without manually scaffolding 20 slides
• You have source material in PDF or Markdown and need a presentable output fast

Why Quarto + Claude Code works better than other slide tools

Most slide deck generators are disconnected from your research: you export a PDF, paste text into slides, manually fix formatting. /quarto is different because Claude Code can read your actual source files — notes, paper drafts, data tables — and produce a structured, styled deck in a single command. No copy-paste, no reformatting loop.

Quarto's .qmd format is plain text, which means Claude Code can read, edit, and re-render it the same way it edits any other file. Most GUI slide tools produce binary formats or proprietary markup that an AI assistant cannot meaningfully work with. With Quarto, the entire slide deck is always inspectable, editable, and version-controllable.

Mermaid diagrams render natively inside Quarto RevealJS — you describe a flowchart, process diagram, or architecture diagram in plain text and it appears as a clean vector graphic in the slide. Claude Code writes the Mermaid syntax and previews it inline. See the Mermaid documentation for what's possible: flowcharts, sequence diagrams, Gantt charts, entity relationships, and more.

What it does — and what it won't

/quarto reads your source documents, designs a narrative arc, proposes a slide outline for your approval, then generates a complete Quarto RevealJS .qmd file with a companion CSS file. It renders the deck and opens it for review.

Note: Two approval gates before any slides are rendered — you approve the slide outline first, then review the full rendered deck before it's final. Source documents should be readable text files; run /readable on PDFs first if needed. Rendering can fail if text overflows slides — /quarto handles CSS adjustments automatically.

Worked example

Priya is presenting her RNA-seq pipeline at a lab group meeting in 48 hours. She has her methods paper draft and a benchmark comparison table, but no slides.

/quarto "20-min lab talk on pseudobulk DE pipeline, read methods/pipeline_draft.md and results/benchmark_comparison.md"

/quarto reads both files, proposes a 19-slide outline: Title, Motivation (2), Background (2), Pipeline Architecture (3), Benchmark Results (5), Limitations (2), Conclusion (2). Priya approves. It writes slides.qmd and custom.css, renders, and opens in her browser. The benchmark table is wide — /quarto adds an overflow CSS class automatically.

Try it

/quarto "talk description, read source_doc.md"
/quarto "5-slide update, read weekly_summary.md"