Why DWA?

DWA Slides answers a simple question: how do you produce presentations that stay consistent with an organization's brand guidelines, without spending your time aligning boxes?

The problem

In a traditional presentation tool, every slide mixes two things: what you say and how it is laid out. The consequences are well known:

• The branding drifts. You duplicate an old presentation, copy a colleague's slide, and an "almost right" color creeps in. Nobody knows which version of the template is the correct one.
• Layout is expensive. Moving an image, balancing three columns, shrinking text that runs over: this work is redone by hand on every slide.
• The content is hard to review. A binary file cannot be compared line by line, is not easy to version and does not lend itself to peer review.
• Text overflows. One paragraph too many spills out of the card, and you only notice it while presenting.

The DWA answer

DWA separates substance from form, then provides tooling for each.

	Who handles it	Where it lives
The content	The author	A Markdown file
The layout choice	The author, in one line	The <!-- _class: … --> directive
The appearance (colors, fonts, backgrounds)	The brand owner	The organization's CSS theme
Verification	The VS Code extension	Diagnostics and render measurement
Theme distribution	The portal	Published versions, access per person or group

In practice, a slide looks like this:

<!-- _class: content image-text-40 with-title with-legend fit small -->

# The site is progressing

![](chantier.png)

> ## Where are we?
>
> The foundations are finished, the structure is underway.
>
> - Next step: the roof
> - Team meeting every Monday

Illustrative image and content.

The author chose no color, no position and no font size. They said: "a content slide, image on the left at 40%, with a title and a caption".

What you gain

For authors

• Write fast. Typing --- creates a slide; the extension suggests the layout, then prefills its structure. All that is left is to replace the text.
• Change your mind without redoing everything. Switching from cols-2 to cols-3, or from image-text to text-image-70, does not touch the content.
• Get warned before you present. Unknown classes, ambiguous combinations, incorrect structure and overflowing text show up in the VS Code Problems panel, with suggested fixes.
• Keep PowerPoint when you need it. The export produces a .pptx whose text, lists and tables remain editable.

For brand owners

• A single source of truth. The theme is a versioned CSS file. A published version never changes; a fix is a new version.
• Controlled access. The portal assigns each version to the whole organization or to a group. Authors only see what concerns them.
• A stable language. The classes (content, cols-3, color-2…) form a contract, Core v1. A new brand identity can change every color without any author rewriting their Markdown.

For teams

• Presentations you can review like code. Markdown can be diffed, commented on and merged with the usual tools (Git, reviews).
• Nothing leaves your machine. Presentations stay local: the portal distributes themes, it never receives your documents.
• Ready for AI agents. A short vocabulary and verifiable rules are exactly what an agent needs to produce clean slides. That is the purpose of the planned MCP server.

Why not…

…"raw" Marp?

Marp already turns Markdown into slides, and DWA builds on it. But an ordinary Marp theme mainly provides typography: elaborate layouts (columns, image and text, galleries, timelines) require HTML or CSS written by hand in each presentation. DWA adds:

• a documented, stable layout vocabulary;
• writing assistance that knows this vocabulary;
• overflow measurement in a real browser;
• an editable PowerPoint export;
• governed distribution of themes.

…a PowerPoint template?

A PowerPoint template sets colors and masters, but prevents neither drift nor the placement work, and its content remains hard to review and to version. DWA keeps PowerPoint as a possible output format, not as a working format.

Who it is not for

Let's be clear about the limits:

• DWA is not a free-form drawing tool. A highly graphic, one-off slide is better made in desktop publishing or presentation software.
• The language covers the common layouts of a business or training presentation; it does not claim to cover everything. See Combinations and limits.
• The PowerPoint export is faithful in structure, but its text measurements are estimates: review the file in PowerPoint before sharing it.

What's next?

• Understand how it works: How it works.
• Install and try it: Get started.