Creating Presentations

Presentations in Toboggan are written in TOML format. You can also write slides in Markdown and convert them with the CLI.

Step-by-step: create your first presentation

1. Create a new file

touch my-talk.toml

2. Write the presentation header

[presentation]
title = "My First Talk"
author = "Your Name"
description = "A demo presentation for Toboggan"

This section defines the overall presentation metadata.

3. Add slides

Each slide is a [[slides]] entry. Slides appear in the order you write them.

[[slides]]
kind = "Part"
title = "Introduction"

A Part slide acts as a section divider.

[[slides]]
title = "Welcome!"
body = '''
This is my first slide.

Toboggan supports **bold**, *italic*, and `code` in Markdown.
'''

4. Add more slides

[[slides]]
title = "Key Points"
body = '''
- First point
- Second point
- Third point
'''

[[slides]]
title = "Code Demo"
body = '''
Here is some Rust code:

```rust
fn hello() {
    println!("Hello Toboggan!");
}
```
'''

[[slides]]
title = "Thanks!"
body = "Thank you for watching!"

5. Run the server

toboggan-server my-talk.toml

Open http://localhost:8080 in your browser to see your presentation.

Full example

[presentation]
title = "My Talk"
author = "Your Name"
description = "A short description"

[[slides]]
kind = "Part"
title = "Part 1"

[[slides]]
title = "Welcome!"
body = "Hello world!"

[[slides]]
title = "Styled Slide"

[slides.style]
background_color = "#2d3436"
color = "#dfe6e9"

[[slides]]
kind = "Part"
title = "Part 2"

[[slides]]
title = "With Notes"

body = "Slide content here"

[slides.notes]
body = "Speaker notes — only visible in presenter mode"

Slide fields

Style fields

Notes

[slides.notes]
body = "Your speaker notes here"

Notes are visible in presenter mode and are not shown to the audience.

Converting Markdown to TOML

If you prefer writing in Markdown:

# Convert a folder of markdown files to TOML
toboggan-cli slides/ -f toml -o presentation.toml

Your folder structure:

slides/
├── 01-intro.md
├── 02-details.md
└── 03-end.md

Each Markdown file becomes a slide. The frontmatter of each file sets the slide metadata:

---
title: "My Slide"
duration = "1m"
---

Slide content here...