Content generated by an LLM with human direction.

Eigendeck manual

A user-facing guide to building talks in Eigendeck. Start with the philosophy, then build your first deck, then dig into individual elements and features.

Different from DESIGN_DECISIONS.md and the other top-level *.md docs — those explain implementation choices to people reading the code. The manual explains editorial choices to people building presentations.

Start here

• Philosophy — what Eigendeck is for: building interactive show-and-tell sessions where you demonstrate ideas live, not just describe them.
• Building a presentation — a slide-by-slide walkthrough of the built-in Welcome to Eigendeck deck, with screenshots, showing how each slide was constructed.
• Building demos with LLMs — how to produce the interactive pieces that make a talk show-and-tell.

Elements & features

A run-through of the building blocks:

• Elements — the full set: text presets (title / body / textbox / note / footnote / hype), annotations, images, arrows, covers, and the interactive elements (demos, notebooks, videos).
• Styles and fonts — the ten font families (each with a matching math font), MathJax + macros, themes, and per-element text styling.
• Text sizes — the named type scale and why slide-level overrides don't exist.
• Interactive demos → — see the LLM guide above; the full authoring contract is DEMO_AUTHORING.md.
• Notebooks — embedding Jupyter notebooks, in-deck recording (your source file is never touched), editable vs. file-watching, display options, and syncing a notebook across slides.
• Jupyter servers — the per-machine kernel-server registry, why deck files don't carry URLs or tokens, and the topbar status pill.
• Videos — local video files (embedded + watched) vs. YouTube/Vimeo/PeerTube embeds, the playback options, and how thumbnails/export work.
• Watched assets — how files you add are embedded and live-watched, the Watch cascade (global → deck → per-asset), "editable = take control" for notebooks, and Reload-from-disk.
• Security: your files stay yours — why decks you receive can show everything but can't read live files off your disk until you trust them, the Security Panel, and how the app respects your data and your time.
• Sync and link — the two ways to relate elements across slides (sync unifies, link animates), the duplicate→free→move animation workflow, the S/A badges, promoting a link to a sync, and what copy/paste does.
• Cut, copy, and paste — what paste does on the canvas vs. in a text box, pasting images/SVG/PDF, and pasting a spreadsheet/HTML selection as a deck-font picture.

(More topics are added as features land.)

How to read this

Each topic page starts with the rule (what the tool does), then the reasoning (why it does that), then the workflow (how to live with it well). If a topic explains a constraint you find frustrating, read past the rule — the reasoning is usually the point.