deckcraft

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What works today

DeckCraft is in alpha, heading for beta (see the roadmap). Today it can:

• Make decks: slide masters and eleven layouts with placeholders that inherit position and formatting, eight original themes with colour and font schemes, sections, notes, comments, headers and footers, custom slide sizes.
• Draw: 150+ preset shapes with adjust handles, connectors that stay glued to shapes, freeform, curve and scribble tools, merge shapes (union, combine, fragment, intersect, subtract), gradient, picture and pattern fills, outlines with dashes and arrowheads, shadows, glow, soft edges and reflections.
• Write: in-place text editing with full font and paragraph formatting, bullets and numbering, columns, autofit, vertical text, fields and hyperlinks.
• Add content: pictures with crop and corrections, tables with styles, charts, SmartArt basics, audio and video (MP3, AAC, FLAC, ALAC, Ogg, Opus, WAV, AIFF; H.264, HEVC, VP9, AV1).
• Present: transitions (including Morph), entrance/emphasis/exit and motion-path animations, by-paragraph builds, full-screen slide show, presenter view, pen, rehearse timings, media playback.
• Exchange files: open and save .pptx presentations, export PDF (slides, notes pages, handouts with selectable text), PNG/JPEG, an animated GIF of the deck and outlines. Unsaved work is kept by AutoRecover.
• Automate: 200+ commands with undo, all scriptable from the CLI, a JSON control channel and an MCP server for AI agents.

Getting started

PDF export uses the shared craft-pdf writer with import features disabled. See crates/pdf/README.md for the dependency and validation requirements.

git clone https://github.com/storytold/deckcraft
cd deckcraft
cargo run --release -p deckcraft-cli -- render --sample --all --scale 1 out/

On Linux, the build also needs the ALSA headers for slide-show sound: alsa-lib-devel on Fedora, libasound2-dev on Debian and Ubuntu, alsa-lib on Arch. Without them it stops at alsa-sys.

Fonts come from craft-fonts: clone it next to this repo (../craft-fonts) and local builds pick it up automatically; without it DeckCraft uses your system fonts.

Each GitHub release has ready-made builds, on Linux as an AppImage, a .deb, an .rpm and a tarball. On Gentoo, the community ::snakebyte overlay packages the Linux release as app-office/deckcraft-bin (not maintained by the DeckCraft team):

eselect repository add snakebyte git https://github.com/switch87/snakebyte-overlay.git
emaint sync -r snakebyte
echo 'app-office/deckcraft-bin ~amd64' >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/deckcraft
emerge --ask app-office/deckcraft-bin

Logs

The desktop app writes its log records to standard error and to logs/deckcraft.log in the settings directory, beside ui.json and prefs.json (Linux ~/.config/deckcraft/logs/, or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/deckcraft/logs/; macOS ~/Library/Application Support/DeckCraft/logs/; Windows %APPDATA%\DeckCraft\logs\). A start from a desktop menu or the Dock has no terminal, so this file is what to attach to a bug report: the crash guard's panic report, a failed crash-recovery save, Parts skipped on import and audio output problems land there. Each launch moves the previous log to deckcraft.1.log (and that one to deckcraft.2.log), so the log of a run that crashed survives the next start. The file stops growing at 16 MiB. --version writes no file.

Variable	Effect
RUST_LOG	Log levels for standard error and the log file. Default: info for DeckCraft's own crates, warn for everything else. env_logger-style directives replace that, e.g. RUST_LOG=debug, RUST_LOG=warn,deckcraft_pptx=trace or RUST_LOG=info,wgpu_core=warn; a directive ending in * covers every target starting with it (deckcraft*=debug).

The logger is apps/deckcraft/src/logging.rs; the realtime audio callback does not log. The web app logs to the browser console instead.

Agents, CLI and MCP

Every action in DeckCraft is a command with a stable id, so people, scripts and AI agents use the same verbs:

deckcraft-cli commands format.          # list commands
deckcraft-cli run --sample --cmd 'slide.new={"layout":"titleOnly","title":"Hello"}' --save hello.deckcraft
deckcraft-cli mcp                       # MCP server over stdio (headless)
deckcraft-cli mcp --connect 7990        # drive the running app (deckcraft --control 7990)
deckcraft-cli mcp --automation-read-root DIR --automation-write-root DIR   # confine the headless agent to folders

Roadmap

DeckCraft is in alpha. It covers 84% of the features tracked in docs/target-app-parity.md by breadth (92% of the core ones, measured) and is about 55% ready for real work across all tracked capabilities (estimated). See ROADMAP.md for the stage, numbers by dimension and what's next, docs/target-app-parity.md for the full assessment, docs/gaps.md for every known shortfall and docs/parity-checklist.md for the feature-by-feature checklist.

Downloads

Download DeckCraft from GitHub: the latest release has every build listed below, and all releases has earlier versions and their notes. <ver> in the file names is the version number, and SHA256SUMS.txt lists a checksum for every file.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗