SMF·PITCH
Can a prompt replace Pitch?
Design — visual design and presentations
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Writing slides as text and rendering them is a well-trodden path, and a deck-as-code tool with a live preview and a clean PDF export is a real weekend project. Where the days go is the editor: drag a text box, snap it to a guide, undo it, and have the result look identical when someone else opens the file. Pitch is bought for team decks, and the moment two people need the same deck at once, a local build has nothing to offer.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a deck-as-code presentation tool: one Markdown file in, a rendered deck and a print-quality PDF out.
Source format: a single Markdown file where slides are separated by a horizontal rule. Each slide can carry a YAML front-matter block selecting a layout and setting per-slide options. Ship six layouts and no more: title, section divider, bullets, two-column, full-bleed image with caption, and quote. Layout choice is the only positioning control — no coordinates, no free placement. Support speaker notes in an HTML comment block that never renders on the slide.
Theme: a single CSS file defining fonts, colours, spacing scale and the six layouts. Ship two themes and document how to write a third. Fonts are loaded from local files, never from a CDN, so an export is reproducible offline.
Editing loop: run a local server that watches the Markdown file and hot-reloads the browser preview, with the current slide preserved across reloads. A grid overview shows every slide at once and clicking one jumps the source editor to it.
Presenting: a presenter view in a second window showing the current slide, the next slide, speaker notes and a timer, synchronised through a broadcast channel rather than a server.
Export: a PDF where text remains selectable text and vector shapes stay vector, plus a self-contained HTML file with the deck and its assets inlined, which is what you send to someone who cannot open your tooling. Warn before export if any slide overflows its layout box, since silently clipped content is the failure mode that matters.
Out of scope: a drag-and-drop canvas, real-time collaboration, comments, view analytics, and any hosted service or account.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 real-time co-editing and comments on individual slides
- B.2 the shared template and brand library a team pulls from
- B.3 the analytics on who opened a shared deck and how far they read
- B.4 the visual editor — everything here is typed, not dragged
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: editor polish, assets, collaboration, and distribution
Because decks are made under deadline by people who are not going to learn a syntax, and a template that keeps a whole team's slides consistent is worth more than any individual feature.
Questions
Can I get my Pitch decks out?
As PDF, yes, and as PowerPoint with some loss. Neither converts into Markdown, so moving a deck across means rebuilding it. The realistic path is to start new decks here and leave finished ones where they are.
Is a text format actually faster than dragging boxes?
For content-heavy decks with a consistent look, yes, and noticeably so. For a one-off pitch deck where every slide is bespoke, no — you will fight the layout constraints. The six-layout limit in the prompt is deliberate: it is what makes the format fast, and removing it turns the build into a canvas editor.
What does it cost to run?
Nothing. It runs locally, the fonts are local files, and the output is a PDF or a single HTML file. There is no server and no account.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Someone else touching the deck. Pitch exists because decks are made by teams under deadline, and a Markdown file in one person's repository cannot be edited by a colleague at the same time, or commented on, or restyled to match a brand kit they own.
Related tools
Receipt