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Lattice Lattice

Authoring decks

A Lattice deck is one Markdown file. You compose it from named layouts, one per slide, and the engine assembles each slide against the deck’s palette. You never set fonts, colors, or positions by hand.

Anatomy of a deck

Section titled “Anatomy of a deck”
---
marp: true
theme: indaco       # palette (see Themes & palettes)
paginate: true
header: "Quarterly Review"
---


<!-- _class: title -->


# Deck title


`Category · Date or audience`


One-line subtitle that frames the deck.


---


<!-- _class: cards-grid -->


## Three pillars


- Reliability
  - 99.95% uptime across the quarter.
- Velocity
  - Lead time down 40% since Q1.
- Cost
  - Unit economics improved 12%.

Three things to notice:

  1. Front matter selects the palette (theme:), the deck’s finish (finish:), and global chrome (paginate, header, footer).
  2. --- separates slides.
  3. <!-- _class: NAME --> picks the layout for that slide. The layout decides the structure; your Markdown fills the slots.

Picking a layout

Section titled “Picking a layout”

Each layout has a contract: which headings, lists, and slots it expects, and what it’s for. The layouts are organized into twelve buckets by the job they do — anchor, statement, inventory, comparison, progression, evidence, imagery, plus the substance buckets (chart, diagram, math, code) and the legal domain set.

The fastest way to choose is the component reference: an interactive catalog of every layout with its slots, variants, when to reach for it, and when not to — and you can preview the whole thing in any Lattice palette. The same content is also available as a single Markdown document.

The card-style nesting rule

Section titled “The card-style nesting rule”

Card-style layouts (cards-grid, cards-stack, featured, decision, verdict-grid, and others) expect nested list items, not inline bold titles:

- Title
  - body text continues here

Not - **Title.** body text — the autobold rule on those layouts would make the body inherit the title’s weight. The component reference flags this per layout, and the repo’s commit-time validator catches it across every deck.

Modifiers

Section titled “Modifiers”

Any layout accepts universal modifiers appended to the class — dark, compact, loose, accent, state markers, and treatments. For example <!-- _class: cards-grid dark --> renders the grid on the dark canvas. The catalog of modifiers lives in the design system reference in the repository.

The finish: key — a hand-drawn deck

Section titled “The finish: key — a hand-drawn deck”

A finish is the deck’s type-and-geometry voice, separate from its palette. Set it once in front matter and every slide inherits it:

---
theme: carta        # palette — still owns the colours
finish: sketch      # finish — the whole-deck voice
---

finish: takes one of three values:

  • boardroom — the clean baseline. The default when you omit the key.
  • sketch — a hand-drawn register: felt-tip headings, a hand-sans for prose, and every card/box redrawn as a sketched frame.
  • sketch-clean — hand headings and boxes, but a clean body font for text-dense slides.

The finish is palette-blind — it wobbles type and geometry, never colour, so it pairs with any theme. It also composes with per-slide layouts: finish: sketch plus <!-- _class: cards-grid --> renders a hand-drawn grid with no extra markup. A misspelled value (finish: sketchh) is caught by the deck linter rather than silently rendering the baseline.

Autocomplete in the Drawing Board

Section titled “Autocomplete in the Drawing Board”

The Drawing Board is the in-browser editor. It completes the deck vocabulary as you type, from the same catalog the component reference and the linter use. Every suggestion is deterministic and offline; Ctrl-Space summons any of them on demand.

  • theme: in front matter — the registered palette names. An unknown one renders an unstyled white deck, so the name stays valid.
  • finish: in front matter — the finish-register names (boardroom, sketch, sketch-clean), the same set the linter validates, so a typo can’t slip through. The Deck setup drawer also exposes Finish as a picker.
  • Inside <!-- _class: … --> — layout names (tagged by bucket), then the modifiers that layout accepts, its own variants first and the universal ones after.
  • On an empty slide — a skeleton completion drops the layout’s slot scaffold already in the correct nesting, so a card-style slide starts from the - Title / - body shape rather than the inline-bold trap above.
  • Other slide directives — _paginate, _header, _footer, and friends inside an HTML comment, plus _paginate’s true / false / skip values.
  • Fence languages — the language id after ```, including the mermaid and chart blocks Lattice renders.
  • Inside a mermaid block — the Mermaid diagram and flow keywords.
  • Inside a map slide’s list — the country, state, and group names the basemap resolves, including blocs and categories like European Union or Global South, so the spelling matches on the first try.

Deck setup (front matter without the YAML)

Section titled “Deck setup (front matter without the YAML)”

The Drawing Board’s Deck setup drawer — the sliders button beside the settings chip — edits the deck’s front matter through plain controls, so you never hand-write the --- block and the Markdown body stays content-only. It covers the whole-deck settings: theme, slide size (16:9 / 4K / 4:3), page numbers, running header / footer, and a few advanced ones (a default slide class, math renderer, document language). The controls are pre-filled from whatever front matter the deck already has, and each change writes a minimal block back to the top of the source — so the values persist across refreshes and travel with an exported .md. A deck with nothing configured carries no front matter at all.

Theme is one value in three places. The top-bar palette picker, the Deck setup drawer’s theme select, and the editor’s theme: line are kept in sync: pick a palette in either control and it’s written into the deck (and the preview + page recolor); type a valid theme: in the editor and the picker follows. Only a registered palette is applied — a typo stays in your source so you can fix it, but the deck keeps rendering in the last valid palette rather than going unstyled, and the drawer flags it.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”