💅 How to Make Dope Slides

A guide to creating polished presentation slides using Quarto and Reveal.js with custom CSS.

Sam Foreman 2024-08-13

• Quarto 🤝 Reveal.js
• Getting Started
  • 🎁 Install Extensions
• Metadata
• Title Slide
• Single-Column Slides
• Centered Slides
• Multi-Column Slides
• 💅 CSS
• 📃 GitHub Page
• 📓 References

Quarto 🤝 Reveal.js

So, after making a promise some time ago on twitter [^1], and having many questions following my talk on Parallel Training Techniques last week, I’m finally getting around to writing this up.

The slides are written using Quarto, a flavor of Markdown, and uses the built-in Quarto + Reveal.js functionality.

For this post, I’ll focus on the slides I presented at last years Lattice 2023, shown below:

📂 docs/
├── 📂 assets/
├── 📂 css/
├── 📄 index.html
├── 📄 lattice23.md
├── 📄 search.json
└── 📂 site_libs/

$ git add docs
$ git commit -m 'Create site'
$ git push

Getting Started

Whenever I give a talk, my workflow is typically:

1. Create new GitHub repo for it

2. Hunt down the GitHub repo from my last talk and[^2]:

   $ cp -r old_talk/{_quarto.yml,index.qmd,references.bib,css/*} new_talk/

Honestly, other than that, 90% of the work is done automatically by Quarto. The remaining 10% consists of figuring out why my css is broken (see CSS).

The best place to start for learning to make slides with Quarto and Reveal.js is the official documentation:

1. Quarto / Presentations / Revealjs:
   1. Reveal Basics
   2. Presenting Slides
   3. Advanced Reveal
   4. Reveal Themes

• The slides are written in markdown Quarto (.qmd)[^3], a pandoc-compliant based markup language.

• For a single slide deck, the content will be placed in index.qmd and our directory structure will look something like:

  📂 lattice23/
  ├── 📂 assets/            # for images, etc.
  │   └── 🖼️ thumbnail.png  # can be used as social preview image
  ├── 📂 css/
  │   ├── 📄 callouts.css
  │   ├── 📄 dark.scss
  │   └── 📄 default.css
  ├── 🛠️ _quarto.yml        # Configuration goes here
  ├── 📄 index.qmd          # Quarto document containing slides content
  └── 📜 references.bib     # BibTex references

• Equations are rendered using $ delimiters for inline math and $$ for display math[^4].

• We can use Divs and Spans from Pandoc.

  • <span>’s: are created by wrapping text in square brackets, and will be treated as a <span> with attributes if it is followed immediately by attributes, e.g.:

    • Example: [This is *some text*]{.class key="val"}

    • idk what I’m doing really, so I mostly find myself doing things like [blue text]{style="color:#1E88E5;"} which produces blue text.

  • <div>’s: are created by wrapping text with a line consisting of at least three colons :::.

    • Example:

      ::: {#special .sidebar}
      Here is a paragraph.
      
      And another.
      :::

    • We can use either attributes in curly braces or a single unbraced word, which will be treated as a class name.

🎁 Install Extensions

Find the full list of available extensions at Quarto Extensions

To install various icon sets used in the example slides, we can install the following extensions:

$ quarto install extension mcanouil/quarto-iconify      # https://icones.js.org/ [<-- Contains rest of icon sets ??]
$ quarto install extension shafayetShafee/bsicons       # bootstrap icons
$ quarto install extension schochastics/academicicons   # OrcID, Google Scholar, ...
$ quarto install extension quarto-ext/fontawesome       # Font Awesome icons

note that these aren’t necessary for functionality, but provide additional icons that I like to use 🤷🏻‍♂️

Metadata

The first section of our index.qmd contains the YAML metadata for the Quarto document.

Explicitly, we see this consists of:

---
format:
    revealjs:
        title-block-style: none
        slide-number: c
        title-slide-style: default
        chalkboard:
            buttons: false
        auto-animate: true
        reference-location: section
        touch: true
        pause: false
        footnotes-hover: true
        citations-hover: true
        preview-links: true
        controls-tutorial: true
        controls: false
        logo: 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/saforem2/anl-job-talk/main/docs/assets/anl.svg'
        history: false
        theme: [dark, css/dark.scss]
        css: [css/default.css, css/callouts.css]
        self-contained: false
        embed-resources: false
        self-contained-math: false
        center: true
        highlight-style: 'atom-one'
        default-image-extension: svg
        code-line-numbers: true
        code-overflow: scroll
        html-math-method: katex
        fig-align: center
        mermaid:
            theme: dark
    gfm:
        output-file: 'lattice23.md'
---

The complete list of Reveal.js options are listed, with descriptions at: Quarto – Revealjs Options

Title Slide

• Starting with the title slide[^5]:

  

  Figure 1: Title Slide

  • The full slide contents are included below:

    Expand for quarto

    # {.title-slide .centeredslide background-iframe="https://saforem2.github.io/grid-worms-animation/" loading="lazy"}
    
    ::: {style="background-color: rgba(22,22,22,0.75); border-radius: 10px; text-align:center; padding: 0px; padding-left: 1.5em; padding-right: 1.5em; max-width: min-content; min-width: max-content; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding-top: 0.2em; padding-bottom: 0.2em; line-height: 1.5em!important;"}
    
    [MLMC: Machine Learning Monte Carlo]{.style="color:#939393; font-size:1.5em; font-weight:bold;}  
    [for Lattice Gauge Theory]{style="color:#777777; font-size:1.2em; font-weight: bold;"}
    [<br>&nbsp;]{style="padding-bottom: 0.5rem;"}  
    [](https://samforeman.me) Sam Foreman  
    [Xiao-Yong Jin, James C. Osborn]{.dim-text style="font-size:0.8em;"}  
    [[[ `saforem2/`](https://github.com/saforem2/)]{style="border-bottom: 0.5px solid #00ccff;"}`{`[[`lattice23`](https://github.com/saforem2/lattice23)]{style="border-bottom: 0.5px solid #00ccff;"}, [[`l2hmc-qcd`](https://github.com/saforem2/l2hmc-qcd)]{style="border-bottom: 0.5px solid #00ccff;"}`}`]{style="font-size:0.8em;"}
    
    :::
    
    ::: footer
    [2023-07-31 @ [Lattice 2023](https://indico.fnal.gov/event/57249/contributions/271305/)]{.dim-text style="text-align:left;'}
    :::

  • For the background, I made a simple animation saforem2/grid-worms-animation that is hosted on GitHub pages as a simple html website

  • This static GitHub page is then used as an IFrame Background natively in Quarto with Reveal.js

  • This is as simple as:

    # {.title-slide .centeredslide background-iframe="https://saforem2.github.io/grid-worms-animation/" loading="lazy"}

Single-Column Slides

Other than the title slide, the remainder of the slides are all relatively straightforward to construct.

For single-column slides, constructing the content is as simple as writing it in Markdown:

Code

# Overview

1. [Background: `{MCMC,HMC}`](#markov-chain-monte-carlo-mcmc)
    - [Leapfrog Integrator](#leapfrog-integrator-hmc)
    - [Issues with HMC](#sec-issues-with-hmc)
    - [Can we do better?](#sec-can-we-do-better)

2. [L2HMC: Generalizing MD](#sec-l2hmc)
    - [4D $SU(3)$ Model](#sec-su3)
    - [Results](#sec-results)
3. [References](#sec-references)
4. [Extras](#sec-extras)

Slide

Figure 2: Overview Slide

Centered Slides

We can center all the text on a slide by adding the {.centeredslide} class to the slide header, e.g.

---
format:
    revealjs:
        theme: [style.scss]
---

# Title {.centeredslide}

.centeredslide {
    text-align: center;
}

Multi-Column Slides

Side-by-side content (either text or images)

• Note that we additionally have a ::: footer element included at the bottom of the slide.

• The code used to generate the slide above is included below:

  Expand forquarto

  # Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) {.centeredslide}
  
  :::: {.columns}
  
  ::: {.column width="50%"}
  
  ::: {.callout-note title="Goal" style="text-align:left;!important"}
  Generate **independent** samples $\{x_{i}\}$, such that[^notation]
  $$\{x_{i}\} \sim p(x) \propto e^{-S(x)}$$
  where $S(x)$ is the _action_ (or potential energy)
  :::
  
  - Want to calculate observables $\mathcal{O}$:  
    $\left\langle \mathcal{O}\right\rangle \propto \int \left[\mathcal{D}x\right]\hspace{4pt} {\mathcal{O}(x)\, p(x)}$
  
  :::
  
  ::: {.column width="49%"}
  <img src="/assets/normal_distribution.dark.svg" />
  :::
  
  ::::
  
  If these were [independent]{.style="color:#00CCFF;"}, we could approximate:
  $\left\langle\mathcal{O}\right\rangle \simeq \frac{1}{N}\sum^{N}_{n=1}\mathcal{O}(x_{n})$
  
  $$
  \sigma_{\mathcal{O}}^{2} = \frac{1}{N}\mathrm{Var}{\left[\mathcal{O} (x) \right]}\Longrightarrow
  \sigma_{\mathcal{O}} \propto \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}
  $$
  
  [^notation]: Here, $\sim$ means "is distributed according to"
  
  ::: footer
  [ `saforem2/lattice23`](https://saforem2.github.io/lattice23)
  :::

💅 CSS

My web developer friend laughs at me, but when something is broken / doesn’t look right / I want it to look different, I:

1. Pull up Chrome Tools ( ⌘ + ⌥ + I )
2. Inspect element of interest ( ⌘ + ⇧ + C )
3. Make changes to the CSS
4. Save the new rule to my .scss file 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’m guessing this might be obvious to some people, but it took me a while to figure out how things worked so maybe its helpful for others.

Expand for css

Figure 4: Example of selecting an element and making a change to the CSS.

📃 GitHub Page

To enable your GitHub page, you can do the following:

Figure 5: Instructions for building a GitHub page using the docs/ directory off the main branch.

In this case, the repo is:

saforem2/lattice23

and the site is published at

https://saforem2.github.io/lattice23

📓 References

• Reveal Themes
• Using Pandoc fenced divs
• Slidecraft 101: Colors and Fonts
• Beautiful Reports and Presentations with Quarto
• Quarto Clean Theme

    Last Updated: 12/22/2025 @ 18:27:29

[^1]: And countless other people IRL

[^2]:
    One thing I’ve been meaning to do, is clean up all my `css/*`
    files and move them all to a single repository, but I’ll save that
    for another day.

[^3]: _An open-source scientific and technical publishing system_

[^4]: [Equations](https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/markdown-basics.html#equations)

[^5]:
    Quarto comes with lightbox support, so you can click on images to
    display them full screen.