seanx10m pd-slides-plus
Everything pd-slides cannot do traces to one fact: a file:// page has no origin, so it
has no storage, no fetch, and no cross-frame access.
Put the same deck behind a local server and four things become possible at once.
python3 ~/.claude/skills/pd-slides-plus/scripts/pdplus.py serve <deck.md> [paper.md]
The renderer is not forked. This is --plus on the same mdview.py pd-slides uses, so
every fix to the slide stage, the paper pairing, the comment rail or the narration lands in
both skills at once. What is forked is the skill: pd-slides stays a file you can email.
Requires two sibling skills to be installed, because it runs their code, not copies of
it: pd-slides (narration, via scripts/pdnarrate.py) and browser-preview (the renderer
itself, via scripts/mdview.py). Without both under ~/.claude/skills/, pdplus.py fails
on import.
Read the pd-slides SKILL first - the deck format, the paper contract, the component vocabulary, the narration and the presenter window are all unchanged and are documented there. This file covers only what the server adds.
Editable diagrams
A fenced draw block becomes a live Excalidraw canvas, in either pane.
```draw pipeline
```
Edits autosave 700ms after you stop drawing, to diagrams/pipeline.excalidraw - a real
file that opens in excalidraw.com like any other. The file is the source of truth and the
deck is one editor for it, which is the opposite of a diagram exported into a slide and
stale by the time anyone argues with it.
--scenes <dir> moves where they live. Excalidraw and React are vendored in assets/
(4.3MB), not loaded from a CDN, so this works on a plane.
The app in the slide
```app http://localhost:3000 520
```
Frames a URL - your running dev server, a dashboard, anything - with a Reload button for when you have just rebuilt it, and an open-in-a-tab link. The trailing number is the height in pixels, default 520.
This is the one feature that is impossible in pd-slides rather than merely awkward: a
file:// page cannot frame http://localhost at all.
The agent pane
g docks a chat panel on the right. You type; it lands in .pdplus/chat.jsonl with the
slide you were on. Claude reads it and answers back into the page.
pdplus.py poll # blocks until the reader says something unread
pdplus.py say "on it - one sec" # replies into the page
poll reads the log, not the socket, so it survives the server restarting, and its read
position is a cursor on disk rather than "everything from now" - a message sent between
two polls is never dropped. --since 0 replays the whole thread.
The messages carry which slide the reader was on, so "this one is too dense" is a complete sentence.
What now persists
http://localhost is a secure context and a real origin, so on top of the above:
- Speaker notes write back to
deck.mdas:::notesblocks when the tab closes. No more copy-out. The file is reassembled byte-identical apart from the note blocks. - The clipboard API works properly instead of falling back to
execCommand. localStorageis available, so preferences survive a reload.
On the network
The server binds to 0.0.0.0 and prints two URLs - localhost and your LAN address - so
someone on another device can open the deck, comment on it, and talk to the agent.
Reads are open to the network. Anything that writes to the filesystem - saving a scene,
writing notes back to deck.md - requires the token in the URL, so being on the wifi is
not the same as being allowed to edit the repo. The token is fresh per run and printed once.
Demo
cd ~/.claude/skills/pd-slides-plus/demo
python3 ~/.claude/skills/pd-slides-plus/scripts/pdplus.py serve deck.md paper.md
Ten slides: the eight from pd-slides plus a live Excalidraw canvas and an app frame - which frames the deck's own server, the cheapest possible proof that it works.
Add --narrate to build the audio track too (first run speaks ~44 clips, then caches).
Not built
- No auth beyond the write token, no TLS. This is a tool for your own machine and your own network, not a deployment.
- The agent side is a CLI the agent drives. There is no daemon watching for you.
- Scenes are per-name, not per-slide. Two
draw pipelinefences are the same canvas, which is a feature when you want the diagram in both panes and a surprise otherwise. - No conflict handling: two people drawing on one scene, last write wins.