Content generated by an LLM with human direction.

Text sizes

The rule

A deck has one type scale, applied uniformly across all slides. Five named sizes:

You can change any of these px values at the deck level — open the Inspector with no element selected, scroll to Text sizes (px) in the Presentation section, and edit the spinner for the size you want to adjust. The override propagates to every element in the deck that uses that named size.

You can also override the size on an individual element. Every sized element — text and notebook — shows the same font-size widget in its inspector: three named buttons (body / note / footnote) plus a numeric spinner. Click a name to bind the element to the deck's scale at that size, or type a custom px value to pin it. This is the escape hatch for cases where the named scale doesn't fit, and it's the same control everywhere so you only learn it once.

There is no slide-level text size override. This is intentional.

The size applies to the whole element — you can't mix font sizes within a single text element. That, too, is intentional: it keeps the text inside an element harmonious. Need two sizes? Use two elements (a Title and a Body, say).

Why this design

A presentation reads as one document, not a sequence of independent slides. Inconsistent type sizes between slides break that read — audiences (and presenters reviewing their own decks) notice when "body" on slide 4 is visibly different from "body" on slide 5, even if neither one looks wrong on its own. Tooling that makes slide-by- slide size changes easy makes that drift the default; tooling that makes it harder makes consistency the default.

The deck-level type scale is the constraint that delivers that consistency. Pick five sizes that work for the kind of talk you're giving — a lecture hall projection wants different numbers than a laptop walkthrough — and the rest of the deck inherits them. When you decide a title is too small, you change the title size once and every title slide updates.

The per-element override exists because real talks have real exceptions: one slide where you genuinely need a smaller body cell to fit a long matrix, one notebook on one slide where you want a larger code font for emphasis. These are individual judgement calls, not slide-wide aesthetics, so they live on the element they apply to.

A slide-level override would sit between those two: bigger blast radius than per-element, smaller than per-deck. It would be useful just often enough to seem like the right tool for the job, then silently produce inconsistent slides. We left it out so the choice stays binary: "this is how the deck looks" vs. "this one element is a deliberate exception."

Workflow

There are two places to set the scale:

• Per-deck (Inspector → Presentation section → Text sizes (px)) — applies to the currently open deck only. This is where you tune the scale for a specific talk.
• Global / new-deck default (Eigendeck menu → Settings → Default text sizes) — seeds the scale for every NEW deck you create. Existing decks aren't touched; they keep whatever they were saved with. Use this when you've found a scale you like and want it as the starting point for everything you make.

Both editors show the built-in default beside each field so you always know what the value would be if you cleared the override.

1. Set the scale once. Open the Inspector with no element selected. Adjust footnote / note / body / title / hype in the Text sizes (px) section until the proportions look right on the kind of screen you'll present on. Default values are tuned for a 1920×1080 projection at conference distance. If you like the result and want it as your global starting point for future decks, copy the same values into the Settings dialog's Default text sizes section.

2. Use the named sizes everywhere. Text presets already pick from the scale; you don't need to think about it. The same body / note / footnote picker appears on every sized element — click a name to bind that element to the deck's scale (overriding the preset for text, or the default note for notebooks).

3. Reach for the numeric override sparingly. If you find yourself typing a custom px value on more than two or three elements per deck, the scale itself is probably wrong — go back to step 1 and adjust the deck-level value instead. That single change fixes every element at once and keeps the deck consistent.

4. title is reserved. It's only available to title text elements. Notebooks and other elements don't list it in their size picker. If you need title-sized text in a non-title element, use the numeric override — and ask yourself whether the element should actually be a title.

Common pitfalls

• "This one slide needs different sizes." Almost always either (a) the element needs a numeric override (one element, not the whole slide), or (b) the deck's scale is wrong (every slide is paying the cost; fix it once at the deck level). The third option — "this slide is genuinely a different kind of slide" — is rare enough that creating a whole separate deck and linking to it is usually a better answer than fragmenting your scale.

• Bumping a name to "fix" a single slide. If you change body from 48 to 56 because slide 12 looks cramped, every body-preset element on every slide jumps. Use a per-element override on slide 12's element instead.

• Picking numbers from a designer's website. Most editorial type scales target a reading distance of two feet. Eigendeck talks default for projection at 20+ feet. The defaults are bigger than you think they should be on your laptop, and that's correct.

See also

• DESIGN_DECISIONS.md "Preferences cascade" — the formal model for how deck → element resolution works (default-setting flavor).
• LLM-EDITING.md — schema reference for PresentationConfig.textSizes and NotebookElement.fontSizeName / fontSize.