MaTiSSe

Appearance

MaTiSSeMarkdown To Impressive Scientific Slides

Write scientific presentations in plain Markdown — LaTeX math, syntax highlighting, rich layouts, and your choice of impress.js or reveal.js.

Quick Start
Guide
View on GitHub
📝

Markdown-first authoring

Write your entire presentation in plain Markdown. MaTiSSe handles heading-to-slide conversion, TOC generation, and multi-level structure (chapters, sections, subsections) automatically.

Quick start

🧮

LaTeX math with MathJax 3

Inline and display math via standard `$...$` and `$$...$$` delimiters. MathJax 3 is loaded from CDN by default — zero configuration for scientific content.

Math & LaTeX

🎨

YAML theme system

Define every visual detail in YAML theme blocks embedded in the source. Control canvas, headers, footers, sidebars, fonts, and colours. Themes support inheritance with `copy-from-theme` and per-slide overrides.

Theme reference

💻

Syntax highlighting

Code blocks are highlighted server-side by Pygments with support for 50+ languages and 48 colour schemes. No JavaScript dependency — highlighting CSS is always generated locally.

Code highlighting

🖥️

Two rendering backends

`--backend impress` (default) gives full impress.js 3D canvas effects and spatial transitions. `--backend reveal` switches to reveal.js: speaker notes, overview mode, and built-in PDF export — same Markdown source, one flag.

reveal.js guide

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Callouts & semantic blocks

Draw attention with five callout types: note, tip, warning, caution, important. Each has a coloured border, icon, and optional title.

Callout blocks

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Theorems & proofs

Number theorems, lemmas, corollaries, definitions, examples, and more with auto-incrementing counters. Cross-reference any block with `@PREFIX-id` syntax.

Theorems & proofs

📊

Diagrams

Embed Mermaid flowcharts, sequence diagrams, Gantt charts, and Graphviz dot graphs directly in slide source. CDN scripts are injected automatically.

Diagrams

🆓

Free and open source

Released under the GNU GPL v3 license. Free to use, study, modify, and distribute. Contributions welcome.

Why MaTiSSe? ​

Scientific presentations demand more than a typical slide tool offers — inline equations, code listings, figures with captions, precise layouts, and reproducible output that lives in version control alongside the paper.

MaTiSSe bridges that gap. Write your talk in Markdown, embed LaTeX equations and code blocks as you would in a paper, and let MaTiSSe generate a fully self-contained HTML presentation — powered by impress.js (3D canvas, spatial transitions) or reveal.js (speaker notes, overview mode, PDF export), selectable with a single flag.

bash
# Install
pipx install MaTiSSe.py

# Generate a sample presentation to start from
matisse --sample mytalk.md

# Build
matisse -i mytalk.md -o mytalk/

A minimal slide source:

markdown
---
title:   My Talk
authors: Stefano Zaghi
date:    April 2026
---

---
theme:
  layout:
    slide:
      width: '900px'
      height: '600px'
---

# Introduction

## Overview

#### First Slide

Content goes here. Use $title to reference metadata, $math with $E = mc^2$.

Author ​

Stefano Zaghi · stefano.zaghi@gmail.com

Chief Yak Shaver & Accidental Research Scientist, HPC farmer at CNR-IAC, National Research Council of Italy

Copyrights ​

MaTiSSe is an open source project distributed under the GPL v3 license.

© Stefano Zaghi