Simple yet powerful slides

Slydekit is a Typst presentation framework designed to make slide creation simple and flexible. Its theme system, inspired by Bookly, makes it straightforward to design and integrate new themes.

Presentations are built directly from document headings, with five predefined themes included out of the box. Slydekit offers a lightweight but complete set of tools for incremental content reveals, slide navigation, styled boxes, and citation handling. The entire framework relies on Typst’s native state and query system, avoiding the need for an additional templating layer.

Import and initialization

Slydekit is used as a #show rule at the top of your document. Everything else in the file is written as ordinary Typst content: headings become sections and slides, and no #slide[…] wrapper is required.

#import "@preview/slydekit:0.3.0": *

#show: slydekit.with(
  title: "Title",
  subtitle: "Subtitle",
  short-title: "Short-title",
  author: "John Doe",
  date: "31 July 2026",
  institution: "Your institution",
  theme: metropolis,
  lang: "fr",
  aspect-ratio: "16-9",
  navigation-style: "topbar",
)

#title-slide

= Introduction

Some introductory content.

== A first slide

This is a slide, created automatically from the level-2 heading above.

Every argument to slydekit(..) is optional and falls back to a sensible default:

Structuring content is purely heading-driven:

• a level-1 heading (= Section) opens a new section and resets the progress indicators;
• a level-2 heading (== Slide title) opens a new slide, equivalent to calling #slide[...] directly;
• #slide(steps: n)[...] can be used explicitly when a slide needs a manual override on its number of reveal steps, or a label: for cross-referencing with @ref.

Section and slide numbering can be enabled with section-numbering: true. By default, regular sections and slides use the "1.1." pattern, while appendix sections and slides use "A.1.". These formats can be customized with numbering-pattern, for example:

#show: slydekit.with(
  section-numbering: true,
  numbering-pattern: (
    section: "1.1",
    appendix: "A.1",
  ),
)

Disclaimer

Slydekit borrows or adapts some of the codes provided by Polylux and Touying for implementing some slide elements. This covers:

• animation: Slydekit slightly adapts the item-by-item and alternatives functions from Polylux.

• outline: Slydekit adapts and extends the progressive-outline and mini-slides and borrows adaptive-columns from Touying.

Main features

Automatic, document-first slide creation. Slides come from headings, so a talk reads like a normal Typst document. #slide is still available for explicit control (custom step counts, labels).

A full incremental-reveal vocabulary, all built on one primitive. #pause, #uncover(..), and #only(..) behave like their Beamer/Touying equivalents. Everything else in the vocabulary is a thin wrapper around that same uncover/only mechanism rather than a parallel implementation, so it inherits its correctness and its cover-fn hook automatically:

• item-by-item(start: n, body) does the same for a list, enum, or terms block. It filters the direct children for list.item/enum.item/terms.item and reveals each in place, without ever reconstructing the container, so native list styling (markers, spacing, #set list(..)) is untouched
• alternatives(start: n, repeat-last: bool, ..options) shows one option per step in the same footprint, with repeat-last: true keeping the final option on screen instead of disappearing once its step is past.
• #meanwhile splits a slide’s top-level flow into parallel tracks at the point it’s used, each with its own local #pause chain, advancing on the same subslide clock instead of one long concatenated sequence. This reproduces Touying’s #meanwhile directly: First #pause Second #meanwhile Third #pause Fourth shows First, Third on the first step and all four on the second
• track(body) splits its own content at #pause independently of the slide’s main flow, so two adjacent columns (typically inside a #grid(..)) can each carry their own pause sequence, synchronized on the same subslide clock rather than concatenated into one long chain
• draw-reveal(..) exposes the same step logic as a plain boolean instead of content, so CeTZ drawings or Fletcher diagrams can conditionally show elements and still reserve their layout space via a hide-fn callback (cetz.draw.hide(bounds: true), for instance). It replaces the former reveal(..) helper
• code-reveal(..) progressively reveals and highlights lines of a code block. It supports the built-in raw-renderer, codly-renderer, and zebraw-renderer, as well as custom renderers
• uncover/only also accept a cover-fn argument for the same purpose when the content being hidden isn’t a boolean-gated diagram but ordinary content that a third-party package wants to mask its own way

Five built-in themes sharing one architecture. metropolis, simple, fancy, cambfurt, and chalkboard (with a color variant) each define the same six-function contract: theme, title, toc, focus-slide, link-box, boxeq, custom-box. Because a theme is just a dictionary, any theme merges onto metropolis as a base, so a partial custom theme only needs to override the pieces it actually changes.

Two navigation styles, computed automatically. "topbar" shows the current slide title in a running header; "minislide" shows a live, per-section mini-outline (mini-slides()) with dots tracking the active slide, built entirely from heading and slide queries, no manual bookkeeping.

Section-aware progress and outline tools. section-progress-bar, slide-progress-bar, tableofcontents, and progressive-outline(..) (a per-slide “you are here” outline with independent numbering for the appendix) all read directly from the document’s heading tree.

A first-class appendix. #appendix[...] restarts slide numbering under an A.1-style scheme, and every navigation and outline helper (mini-slides, show-ref, progressive-outline) is aware of whether a given slide belongs to the main talk or to the appendix.

Citation and footnote helpers. footcite(key) prints a superscript citation call and silently attaches the full reference as a footnote, for slides where a running bibliography page is impractical.

A consistent box library. info-box, tip-box, warning-box, important-box, proof-box, question-box, code-box, and the generic custom-box share one visual language per theme, colored and iconized consistently.

Small layout utilities that solve real slide problems. adaptive-columns chooses 1–3 columns depending on measured content height, full-width lets a block bleed to the page edge regardless of margin shape, row-img lays out one to many logos with sensible left/center/right alignment, and short-or-long displays long title in tableofcontents slides and the short version in the minislide navigation style.

Localization out of the box. Strings such as “Outline”, “Note”, “Tip”, or “Proof” are pulled from a JSON dictionary keyed by lang, currently covering Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese

Themes at a glance

Any theme’s colors and fonts can be overridden per presentation via the colors and fonts arguments to slydekit(..), without needing to fork the theme file.

Dependencies

• showybox:2.0.4 : for custom boxes.

Licence

MIT licensed

Copyright © 2026 Mathieu AUCEJO (maucejo)