Global Flags
Every mdslide command — compile, watch, init, validate, inspect, screenshot, llms, and the interactive wizard — accepts the same five global flags, registered once for the whole CLI. They control machine-readability, prompting behavior, side effects, and timeouts, and are especially useful when driving mdslide from scripts, CI, or an AI coding agent.
Interactive Wizard
mdslide features an interactive, CLI-guided wizard designed to help you quickly build, configure, and preview your presentations without memorizing syntax or command-line flags.
mdslide compile
The compile command compiles a Markdown presentation file into a standalone, distribution-ready output file in HTML, PDF, or PowerPoint (PPTX) format.
mdslide watch
The watch command launches a local development server with a built-in live preview client. Whenever you save changes to your Markdown source file, the compiler automatically rebuilds the slides and reloads your browser instantly.
mdslide init
The init command bootstraps a brand new presentation in the current directory, generating a starter Markdown slide deck and a default configuration file.
mdslide validate
The validate command acts as a linter for your presentation slide deck. It scans your Markdown file, analyzes frontmatter syntax, parses layouts, and inspects content to warn you about potential issues before you export or present.
mdslide inspect
The inspect command compiles your presentation and reports detailed, per-slide diagnostics — resolved layout, estimated content height, element counts, and detected components — without rendering, writing, or opening anything. It's the fastest way to confirm the compiler did what you intended before spending a full compile/render cycle.
mdslide screenshot
The screenshot command compiles your presentation and renders each slide (or a single chosen slide) to a standalone PNG file using headless Chrome/Chromium. It reuses the exact same capture pipeline as compile --pptx-mode screenshot, exposed directly as image files instead of being embedded in a PPTX — the fastest way for a human, a CI job, or an AI agent without a browser to visually confirm what a deck actually looks like.
mdslide llms
The llms command prints the complete SYNTAX.md reference — the canonical, authoritative specification of mdslide's Markdown syntax, layouts, annotations, and CLI commands — as plain markdown to stdout. It's built for piping straight into an AI coding assistant's context window, or saving to a file for later reference.