Deck to .pptx

The deliverable is a .pptx file on disk. Not a web page, an image, a PDF, or a Markdown outline. Name its absolute path in the reply.

What this deployment has

With no image key configured, image_generate says so. Say which pages would have had a picture and carry them on type, grid, rule and colour.

The pages are yours to draw

Every page is drawn here, with python-pptx: the grid, the title row, the type, the marks, the diagrams, the pictures and their treatment. Nothing about a page is settled by a default. raven_ppt.services.assets holds the icon set, add_formula and math_runs; take those and draw the rest.

On this route there is no ANTI-SLOP-CHECK.md, no contract and no Task State. Do not initialize or update one.

Read two skills first

local/deck-to-pptx (this file) and local/design-editorial-and-presentations, which owns the content order and the editorial judgement. Read both before the first page.

Settle four things first

Language, audience, length, ground. Take each from the first of these that settles it: the request; what memory recalled about this user; the defaults. Defaults: the language the request is written in; a general audience; about 20 pages; a light ground.

Ask with ask_user only for a decision none of the three settles and the deck cannot start without: at most one call, before any other work, recommending the default. Where there is no user to ask (the request came from another agent), take the defaults. Say in the reply which of the four were defaults.

Use what the user handed over as much as you can, before anything the rules below go and get: their documents and data are the material, their pictures are the pictures. A .pptx they attached is a template, and a deck on a template is the engine's work, not this skill's: the host routes it there before this skill is read.

Rules

1. Invent no number, no source, no person, no place. Search first. What the search does not find stays a gap that names what is missing and who supplies it.
2. A logo, a product screen, a real person, a real place, a published chart, a paper's own figure: fetch it, never generate it. A generated stand-in for something that exists is a fabrication the page presents as evidence. Generate only what has no original: illustration, backdrop, atmosphere.
3. Anything the deck names that has a face of its own -- a company, a product, a repository, a place -- has a picture somewhere. Search the whole deck's list in one pass before drawing anything: what the material names, and the ordinary furniture it never links -- the logos, the marks, the product shots. Keep each picture's page URL beside it for the source note. A page about five products with no mark of any of them is a page that did not look.
4. Decide the deck's visual direction once, before the first picture, and say what it is: ground, two or three colours, and whether pictures are photographs or drawings. A brand's website is a starting point, not the verdict -- a dark web hero does not make a dark deck, and a printed handout and a projected keynote want opposite grounds. Chaining every background off the first one gives a deck one look and no decision.
5. layouts.md holds reference shapes with their proportions, the type ramp, and nine compositions measured off the packaged templates. Read it to widen the list you choose from, not to pick from a menu: what a page has to say decides its shape. No one shape on more than 60% of the deck.
6. Repeating units -- a card, a row, a step -- take an icon from the packaged set. Search it by what the unit is about, not by a filename: 1304 of them ship beside this agent, and references/assets.md says how. An icon is a mark and not an illustration: about 0.7in, one weight and one colour across the deck, and no filled disc behind it.
7. The cover, the contents page, the closing page and every section opener get a picture with weight: a photograph found for it, or a generated background where no photograph says it. A real photograph of the subject beats a generated texture every time it can be had, so search first. Not a flat colour block, not a picture a body page already uses, not nothing. Two or three such pictures cover a deck. Section openers share one; the cover and the closing page can be the same picture at different crops. A distinct generation per section is 8 serial calls where 3 would do, and a deck whose openers all look different has no house. Each generation takes over a minute and they do not overlap, so settle the whole short list before building rather than asking for one more while drawing each page.
8. Before generating a picture for a page, render that page and look at it. Ask for what the page lacks.
9. Give image_generate the brand material in images. Do not describe it in words. Crop the reference to the mark first. A reference outranks the prompt: hand it a web hero, an og image or a screenshot and it will reproduce that page -- the wordmark, the headline, the buttons -- however firmly the prompt says no text. Say what to take from the reference (its palette, its texture, its light) and that its layout, its type and its furniture are not to be reproduced.
10. Every prompt names the region the type needs -- which side, what share -- and ends with no text, no letters, no numbers. All words on a page are set by the typography.
11. After generating, rebuild the page and look at the render. Only the composed page counts.
12. Read the deck's own render before delivering. Every page, at 90 dpi or more; fix what it showed and render again.
13. Every component is full: what it holds earns its place on the page.
14. Components stand in a hierarchy: one thing read first, the rest stepping down, groups told apart by the space between them.
15. The layout uses the whole page. A page that comes up short is recomposed, not left.

Technical decks

• A paper walk-through, a method or an architecture talk uses the paper's own figures and tables. Crop them from the PDF (references/assets.md). Given no PDF: web_search the title, download the PDF from the publisher or arXiv, crop from that. image_search for the published figure only when no PDF can be had.
• Redraw only what the paper has no picture of, and say so in the caption.
• A formula that stacks (fraction, root, sum with limits): add_formula(slide, tex, left_in, top_in, size_pt=...), one formula per call, size_pt = the body size beside it.
• A sentence carrying symbols (p(θ | D_A), F_i, θ*): math_runs(paragraph, text, size_pt=...).
• A lone Greek letter or plain λ: typed.
• Never leave _A or ^2 as characters in a text box.
• Caption figures and formulas with the paper's own figure and equation numbers.
• After placing a figure or a formula, render the page and look at it.

The numbers a page is measured against

13.333 x 7.5in is 16:9. Keep content 0.7in clear of every edge.

Body under 14.0pt is reported and under 10.8pt is refused; footers may go to 8.0pt. If it does not fit at these sizes, split the page or cut it -- never shrink the type.

Colour carries the hierarchy that size does: ink for the body, muted for what supports it, the accent for what the page is saying -- the word in the title that matters, the figure, the row or the node that answers and so on.

Mechanics that bite here

• A connector lands on a box at both ends. A line into empty space is a node you did not draw, and nothing checks for it.

• A hand-drawn table does not reflow. Every box is placed absolutely, so a cell that wraps to two lines does not push the row below it down -- it runs under the rule drawn at a fixed y, and the rule crosses its second line. Measure the tallest cell in the row, set the row height from that, then place the rule. Set every element in a row from one baseline, and put every ground down before any word, or the fill covers the copy.

• Run the build script with raven-python, the interpreter on PATH that has pptx and raven_ppt; python3 does not. Check with raven-python -c "import pptx, raven_ppt". Do not look for a .venv, build a venv, or install python-pptx.

• spAutoFit with word_wrap=False makes LibreOffice re-centre the text. Remove a:spAutoFit and a:normAutofit from bodyPr when alignment has to hold.

• shape.shadow.inherit = False on every drawn shape, or the theme stamps a drop shadow.

• Remove the p:style element from a freeform, or the theme restyles its stroke.

• slide_layouts[6] is the blank layout. A layout with placeholders puts furniture on the page that nothing asked for.

• Set slide_width and slide_height before adding pages. 13.333 x 7.5in is 16:9.

Load when you need it

• layouts.md -- eleven reference page shapes with the proportions they measured, seventeen cover/section/KPI/process compositions, nine compositions measured off the packaged templates, and when a table is the wrong page. A registry to widen the list you choose from; the numbers above hold without it.
• gates.md -- what refuses a deck and what only reports, with the number each check compares against. Read before the first build.
• assets.md -- the icon library, image generation, and finding real pictures.