PowerPoint Skill

Generates, updates, and manages PowerPoint slide decks using python-pptx with YAML-driven content and styling definitions.

Overview

This skill provides Python scripts that consume YAML configuration files to produce PowerPoint slide decks. Each slide is defined by a content.yaml file describing its layout, text, and shapes. A style.yaml file defines dimensions, template configuration, layout mappings, metadata, and defaults.

SKILL.md covers technical reference: prerequisites, commands, script architecture, API constraints, and troubleshooting. For conventions and design rules (element positioning, visual quality, color and contrast, contextual styling), follow pptx.instructions.md.

Prerequisites

PowerShell

The Invoke-PptxPipeline.ps1 script handles virtual environment creation and dependency installation automatically via uv sync. Requires uv, Python 3.11+, and PowerShell 7+.

Installing uv

If uv is not installed, use a package manager that verifies the download against a published hash:

# Windows
winget install --id astral-sh.uv -e

# macOS / Linux (Homebrew)
brew install uv

To install from a release archive instead, download it from the uv releases page and check it against its .sha256 file before extracting.

System Dependencies (Export and Validation)

The Export and Validate actions require LibreOffice for PPTX-to-PDF conversion and optionally pdftoppm from poppler for PDF-to-JPG rendering. When pdftoppm is not available, PyMuPDF handles the image rendering.

The Validate action's vision-based checks require the GitHub Copilot CLI for model access.

# macOS
brew install --cask libreoffice
brew install poppler        # optional, provides pdftoppm

# Linux
sudo apt-get install libreoffice poppler-utils