Slidex (Slides + Codex)

Use Codex to build and compile slides in pdf format.

Getting started (for humans, not for Codex)

Make sure codex is installed.

codex "please compile the example slides and generate an overview"

Now a potential follow-up can be:

"Make the following slides. Title "Reinforcement Learning and LLMs". Author "Karel D'Oosterlinck". Use current date. Make clear that the goal of the slides is "getting up and running with RL"."

And the first slide produced by that command looks like:

Comming soon (for humans, not for Codex)

• PDF QA tool so Codex can pull information from supporting documents for your slides.
• Visual QA tool so Codex can inspect the resulting slides.

Setup (for Codex, not for humans)

• brew install typst — installs Typst (typst --version now 0.13.1) for compiling slide decks and docs.
• typst init @preview/typslides:1.3.0 — seeds the Typslides template in typslides/version0/ with main.typ.
• magick (ImageMagick 7.1.1-15) — used to render PDF slides to PNG thumbnails and assemble overview.png.

Commands (for Codex, not for humans)

• ./scripts/release-slides.sh — create the next typslides/versionN directory, compile the PDF, refresh thumbnails, and rebuild the overview image. Don't go into every directory that was created manually in order to summarize what happened for the user, just be succinct and tell the user the slides are ready.

The following are details, only run when release-slides.sh does not suffice. Compile slides with typst compile typslides/version0/main.typ (watch mode: typst watch). Number every release as typslides/versionN/main.pdf, keep supporting assets in the same directory, and log changes in CHANGELOG.md. Generate thumbnails via magick -density 200 typslides/version0/main.pdftypslides/version0/thumbs/slide-%02d.png; render high-resolution slide images with pdftoppm -png -r 300 typslides/version0/main.pdf typslides/version0/main; create an overview grid with montage typslides/version0/thumbs/slide-*.png -tile 5x -geometry +8+8 -background white typslides/version0/overview.png.

Versioning (for Codex, not for humans)

Track the CHANGELOG, readme, and different *typ versions using Git. Do not track pngs or pdfs, since we can always recompile these, except the documented artifact in assets/slide-1.png. Commit before a compile and tag the CHANGELOG with that commit hash.