Deck settings¶

Set the title, the theme, and more for the whole deck.

You write deck settings in the frontmatter of deck.md, in deck.yml, or in both:

---
title: "Barkour vault: model mismatch and open problems"
date: "2026-09-16"
theme: dark
---

# deck.yml
theme: minimal
units:
  - N m
  - mm

The frontmatter is the block between two --- lines at the top of the file, and deck.yml sits beside the Markdown file.

Combine the two files¶

The frontmatter wins over deck.yml, key by key, so you can keep shared settings in deck.yml and override them in one deck. For reveal, mkdeck merges the two maps, and the frontmatter wins for each option.

The settings¶

Key	What it does	Default
`title`	Sets the deck title, the browser tab title, and the generated title slide	none
`date`	Sets the date on the title slide and in the corner of every slide	none
`theme`	Sets the look: `minimal` or `dark`	`minimal`
`units`	Sets the units that number marking recognizes. See Numbers and units	the default units
`extra_css`	Lists your stylesheets, linked after the theme	none
`extra_js`	Lists your scripts, loaded after `mkdeck.js`	none
`reveal`	Sets options that mkdeck merges into `Reveal.initialize`	none
`title_slide`	Set it to `false` to drop the generated title slide	`true`

Without a title, mkdeck generates no title slide. See Title slides.

Set the theme¶

A theme is a stylesheet. The minimal theme has a white page and dark text, and the dark theme has a dark page and light text.

Both themes keep the same boxes and sizes, so a slide that fits in one fits in the other. To change colors or fonts, see Custom CSS.

Limits¶

Warning

An unknown key is an error that names the file and suggests the closest key. A theme name with no stylesheet is an error too, so mkdeck never builds an unstyled deck.

Next: What a slide cannot hold.