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astro-slides

Read mode

Decks are shared by URL and revisited after the talk. Slides should stay sparse — one idea each — but your audience later needs the full content: stats with sources, the spoken argument, the detail that would crowd a slide. Read mode is that annotated-presentation format as a first-class output of every deck: each slide rendered as a static block with flowing article prose beneath it.

The ::read:: slot

Section titled “The ::read:: slot”

Companion prose lives in a reserved named slot, using the same ::name:: slot sugar as layouts:

---


## The trust inversion


One sparse chart, one idea.


::read::


Stack Overflow's 2025 survey (~49k respondents) found 84% of developers use or plan
to use AI tools, up from 76% in 2024 — while trust in accuracy fell from 43% to 33%.
Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai/


<!-- pause on the crossing lines, then land the year-over-year drop -->
  • ::read:: content renders only on the read page — never in the live deck, presenter view, print, PPTX, or image exports.
  • Full Markdown/MDX: links, lists, code blocks, components.
  • Author it before the speaker-notes comment — notes are the trailing HTML comment of the slide and stay private, exactly as before.
  • Click steps inside read prose are ignored (they never widen the slide’s step count).

The /read route

Section titled “The /read route”

Every deck gets a prerendered route beside /print:

/read/<deck>            (or  <prefix>/read/<deck>  when embedding with a prefix)
  • Each slide renders as a static, theme-styled block — all click steps revealed, like print — scaled to a readable article column. Responsive and phone-friendly; the only script on the page is a tiny scaler.
  • Slides with ::read:: content get their prose beneath the block; slides without it just show the block. A deck with no annotations still renders (slides only, with a note saying so).
  • Per-slide anchors: #slide-3 links directly to an annotated slide — handy from a blog post. Hover the slide number in the margin for the link.
  • The header links back to the live deck (Present) and to Print. Browser-print of the read page makes a serviceable handout.

Discoverability

Section titled “Discoverability”
  • The ? help overlay in any deck has Open reading view.
  • Multi-deck dashboards get a Read action per deck.

Example

Section titled “Example”

examples/minimal annotates its cover slide; examples/conference-talk shows the conference shape — sparse fact slides with sourced receipts in ::read::.

Source

Section titled “Source”
  • packages/core/src/routes/read.astro — the route
  • packages/client/src/styles/read.css — article layout + slide scaling
  • packages/parser/src/slots.ts — slot sugar (nothing read-specific; read is reserved by convention)