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Slides & presenting

Altretta turns a plain Markdown note into a full-screen presentation, so a meeting agenda or a design doc becomes a deck without copying anything into another app. There is nothing to install or configure — you just write a note and present it.

From note to deck

There's nothing to set up. Any note can become a slide deck: Altretta reads the note top to bottom, breaks it into slides, and shows them full-screen. Because the deck is the note, editing your slides is just editing Markdown — headings, lists, images and embeds, code blocks, and tables all render on the slide exactly as they do in the editor.

Slides are perfect for the notes you already keep — a weekly update, a project brief, an architecture doc. Present straight from your vault instead of rebuilding the same content in a separate slide tool.

Split slides with ---

Altretta starts a new slide at every horizontal rule — a line containing just --- (three or more dashes). Everything between two dividers is one slide. The other Markdown rules work too: a line of *** or ___ breaks a slide just the same.

markdown
# Q3 Roadmap

A quick tour of what ships this quarter.

---

## Now

- Signed history for teams
- Faster vault indexing

---

## Next

- Publishing to a verifiable URL
- Slide themes

That note is a three-slide deck: a title slide, a Now slide, and a Next slide.

The same --- divider draws a horizontal rule in a normal note. In presentation mode it doubles as your slide break, so a well-sectioned note is often already a well-structured deck. A note's frontmatter is stripped before the split, so a ----delimited property block at the top never becomes a blank first slide.

Present full-screen

1

Open the note you want to present

Any note works. If you're building a deck from scratch, split it into slides with --- first.

2

Start the presentation

Enter presentation mode to take the note full-screen. Altretta renders each slide cleanly, with your editor and panels hidden.

3

Move through the slides

Advance and go back with the arrow keys. Slides follow the note's reading order, top to bottom.

4

Exit back to editing

Press Esc to leave presentation mode and land back in the note, ready to keep editing.

Tips for good decks

  • Keep one idea per slide. A short heading plus a few bullets reads better full-screen than a wall of text.
  • Lead with a title slide. Put a single # Heading above the first --- so your deck opens on a clean cover.
  • Reuse your real notes. A meeting note or a spec is often 80% of a deck already — add a few dividers and present it.
  • Let structure carry the deck. Because slides come from your Markdown, tidy headings and lists give you a tidy presentation for free.

Presenting doesn't fork your content. The deck stays a single .md file, and edits you make while shaping slides are captured in your vault's signed history and its version history — so you can travel back to a recent version of the talk.