Presentation Layout

The presentation layout renders a page with no site chrome (no header, footer, or sidebar) and activates the SlideViewer runtime. It works on any page in any collection.

---
title: "Lecture 3: Data Structures"
layout: presentation
---

How it works

Pages with layout: presentation render using the _presentation/baseof.html template, which contains only the page content, the SlideViewer shell markup, and the Scripts component. The SlideViewer plugin injects the viewer's JS and CSS assets on these pages.

Without JavaScript, presentation pages degrade to a plain readable page with a link back to the parent section.

Setting the layout

Three ways to activate the presentation layout:

Per page

Set layout: presentation in frontmatter:

---
title: "My Presentation"
layout: presentation
---

Per section via cascade

Set cascade in a section's _index.md to apply the layout to all children:

---
title: Lectures
cascade:
  layout: presentation
---

Every page in this section renders as slides. The _index.md itself keeps its parent collection's layout (cascade does not apply to the section's own index page).

Slides collection (automatic)

Pages in a slides collection default to layout: presentation with no configuration. This is applied after cascade resolution, so explicit frontmatter and cascade both take precedence.

Dual-output workflow

The same Markdown content can serve as both a documentation page and a slide deck. Configure the collection with its normal layout, then set individual pages or sections to use the presentation layout:

collections:
  lectures:
    layout: docs

---
title: "Week 3: Data Structures"
cascade:
  layout: presentation
---

Pages in week-3/ render as presentations. The rest of the lectures collection renders as documentation with sidebar navigation.

Relationship to the SlideViewer plugin

The layout and the plugin are independent:

• The layout controls the page shell (no chrome, full viewport). It is an engine feature.
• The plugin injects the SlideViewer runtime (JS + CSS). It gates on layout == presentation.

Disabling the slideviewer plugin removes the viewer from presentation pages. The pages still render with the presentation layout (no site chrome) but display as plain readable content.

Template overrides

Override the presentation templates by placing files in the project's layouts/ directory: