Marp compatibility

A deck written for Marp is a go-slides deck. The rules below are Marpit’s and Marp Core’s; where go-slides differs, this page says so.

Slides

A horizontal ruler — --- on a line of its own, as Marpit splits — starts a new slide, and so does a heading of the level the headingDivider directive names. The front matter, between the first two ---, holds global directives and the deck’s data.

Directives

The local directives are Marpit’s: paginate, header, footer, class, backgroundColor, backgroundImage, backgroundPosition, backgroundRepeat, backgroundSize, color. Directives are parsed as loose YAML, as Marp Core does; --strict-yaml parses them as plain Marpit does.

Images

![bg](image.jpg) makes an image the slide’s background, with Marp’s keywords: bg contain, bg cover, bg 50%, bg left/bg right for a split background, several bg images side by side, and the image filters (blur, sepia, grayscale…). Inline image sizes (w:200px, h:) are read as Marp reads them.

Around the slide

• Header and footer: header: and footer: directives, in Markdown.
• Pagination: paginate: true.
• Speaker notes: an HTML comment that is not a directive is a note. slides notes prints them.
• Fragmented lists: a list written with * (or 1)) appears item by item, as in Marp.
• <style scoped>: CSS for one slide only.
• Raw HTML: Marp Core’s allowlist by default; --html allows all of it.
• Emoji: :shortcodes: and Unicode emoji become Twemoji images, as in Marp Core, but embedded instead of loaded from a CDN: see Emoji.

Themes

default, gaia and uncover are built in, selected with theme:. A theme of your own is a CSS file with Marp’s /* @theme name */ comment, given with --theme-set or listed under themes: in slides.yaml.

Where go-slides differs

• Templates. {{ }} in the body is a Go template action (see Templates). A deck that shows {{ as text outside a code block needs --no-template, or the text escaped as Go templates escape it. Code blocks and code spans are left alone.
• Kinds. kind: and _kind: are directives Marp does not have (see Kinds). slides expand replaces them with the directives they stand for, so the expanded deck is plain Marp.
• Outputs. HTML, PNG, JPEG, PDF, PPTX and ODP, through Go libraries rather than a headless browser (see Command line for the known limit). As in marp-cli, a PPTX holds pictures, not editable text.
• Fitting headings. # <!-- fit --> Title is supported: the heading fills the slide width on one line, in the page and in every export.
• Math and code. $…$ and $$…$$ follow Marp Core’s delimiter rules and are typeset by go-tex/math; fenced code is highlighted by go-rouge with highlight.js class names (see Math and code).