Presentations as Code // How to use the Obsidian Advanced Slides plugin

Obsidian’s Advanced Slides plugin turns Markdown notes into fully navigable slide decks—without requiring PowerPoint, Google Slides, or any separate coding-to-publishing workflow. The core payoff is repeatability: slides live inside the same Obsidian vault as regular notes, and exporting/sharing becomes a built-in step rather than a manual conversion pipeline.

The workflow starts with context: slide decks are essentially text and images arranged for presentation, and Obsidian already uses lightweight Markdown for that kind of content. Instead of building slides in a proprietary editor or relying on a web-based tool tied to a specific account, Advanced Slides keeps the authoring experience in Obsidian while still delivering presentation navigation and browser-ready output.

After installing the free community plugin (via Obsidian Settings → Community Plugins, with safe mode turned off), the creator configures options like the local server port and the export directory (for example, “presentations export”). From there, a new note becomes a new presentation: the note title is used as the deck title, and horizontal slides are created by inserting three dashes (---). Vertical slides use two dashes (—), enabling a two-dimensional navigation model where moving “right” advances horizontally and moving “down” drills into vertical stacks.

As content is typed, slide previews update live. Markdown headings map directly onto slide structure, so authors can build decks using familiar syntax rather than learning a separate slide layout system. Images can be pasted into slides and resized using Markdown-like parameters (the example adjusts sizing with a pipe and a numeric value). For full-bleed visuals, the plugin supports setting an image as a slide background using a background directive (e.g., background bg equals …), with slide text layered on top.

Speaker support is built in. A “note” block hides content from the audience while keeping it visible to the presenter. To make that practical during delivery, the plugin offers “Open in Browser,” plus a presenter view: one window for the audience and another for the speaker, where navigation reveals what’s next and the speaker notes remain private.

For on-slide pacing, the plugin supports incremental reveals. Bulleted items can be marked as “elements” of type fragment with a fragment index, so only the relevant item appears as the presenter advances through the slide. Visual consistency is handled via themes; the example switches to “Solarized,” then back to a simpler theme.

Sharing and distribution come from export options. “Export as HTML” produces a self-contained web version that can be copied into a static site workflow (the example uses a Hugo-based static site directory). For offline sharing, “print presentation” generates a PDF—static in the sense that animations become sequential pages, but still preserving images and slide structure. The result is a Markdown-first, code-adjacent slide system that’s easy to iterate locally and then publish as HTML or PDF.