mdTeX

A lightweight converter for Markdown (my own flavour!) to PDF-slides (Latex Beamer) written in Rust.

Creates .pdf and .tex file for slideshows.

There are many Markdown to PDF-slides converter. But as of my knowledge none of them can position images freely on slides. To achieve this, I wrote my own Markdown-flavour that supports a few Latex-Beamer functionalities and is easy to read and fast to write in Markdown style.

Needs pdflatex installed.

More features coming...

• "floating" positionable text-boxes.
• Code syntax support

Documentation

An example Markdown file can be found here.

You can convert it by ./mdTex demo.md. This will generate a demo.tex and demo.pdf file at the same location.

Metadata Setup

• At the beginning of the file
• starts and ends with %%
• key-value pairs that define global configurations

1. theme: Sets the theme of the presentation to one of the Latex Beamer Themes.
2. title: Specifies the title of the presentation.
3. author: Specifies the author of the presentation.
4. date: Inserts the current date. Either a date (eg. 10.01.2024) or LaTeX's \today.
5. indentation: Sets the indentation level to 4 spaces.

Text formatting

• enclosed by * : Text is italic
• enclosed by **: Text is bold
• enclosed by _: Text is underlined
• enclosed by -: Text is crossed

Beamer features

• ---: Separates slides.
  • With slide title: --- This is the slide title.
• #: Huge Heading.
• ##: Large.
• ###: Footnotesized heading.
• // This is a comment: Adds comments.
• [Box title][[This text is inside a box]]: Creates a box with a title and content.
• [][[This box has no Title]]: Creates a box without a title but with content.
• [[This is also a box]]: Also creates a box.

Columns

• ::: Indicates the start and end of column sections.
• :40%, :60%: Specifies the percentage width of columns.

Example

::
:40%
Left column text
:60%
right column text
::

There can be more than two columns.

Images

• ![x:0.0,y:0.0,w:0.25][This is the Image caption](./test.jpg): Inserts an image with parameters for positioning and width, along with an optional caption.
• If positioning is not needed, the x,y,w values should be set to 0.0

General notes

• Paragraphs are separated by an empty line.
• Tabs as indentation do not work.