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How-To Guides

Task-oriented guides for common Pitch Smith operations. Each guide focuses on a specific goal, provides numbered steps you can follow, and assumes you have basic familiarity with Pitch Smith concepts like themes, plans, and slides.

If you are new to Pitch Smith, start with the Quickstart tutorial to build your first slide before diving into these guides.

Available Guides​

  • Build Slides -- Build presentation slides from your deck plan using /pitchsmith:build-all and /pitchsmith:build-one. Covers building all slides at once, building one at a time, rebuilding after plan changes, and viewing the output.

  • Edit Slides -- Edit existing slides with natural language prompts, add build animations, and preview your changes. Covers the /pitchsmith:edit, /pitchsmith:animate, and /pitchsmith:refresh commands.

  • Plan a Deck -- Plan complete presentations and add slides using /pitchsmith:plan-deck, /pitchsmith:plan-one, and /pitchsmith:add-slide. Covers planning a full deck, planning a single slide, adding slides to existing plans, and modifying plans.

  • Use the Slide Viewer -- Navigate, present, and interact with your slides in the VS Code Slide Viewer. Covers opening the viewer, keyboard navigation, toolbar controls, presentation mode, and auto-refresh.

  • Export Presentations -- Export your slides to PDF, PPTX, and PNG formats from the Slide Viewer's download menu. Covers each export format, current fidelity status, and practical tips.

  • Manage Templates -- Browse, create, and modify slide and deck templates. Covers browsing the template catalog, creating new templates with /pitchsmith:add-slide-template and /pitchsmith:add-deck-template, and editing existing templates.

  • Customize Theme -- View, edit, and refine your Pitch Smith theme. Covers viewing theme summaries with /pitchsmith:theme, editing themes with natural language via /pitchsmith:theme-edit, manual CSS variable adjustment, and previewing changes.

  • Troubleshooting -- Diagnose and resolve common issues with Pitch Smith. Covers plugin loading problems, slide rendering issues, brand extraction failures, export errors, viewer issues, and common error messages.