Figures pipeline

Revealer treats figures as build products: the .pres references image files, and the deck build can regenerate them from your scripts so slides never drift out of sync with the analysis.

PDF figures

! fig.pdf (or > svg: fig.pdf) converts the PDF to SVG on the fly with pdftocairo and caches the result in Media/.rv-cache/ keyed on the file’s mtime — TikZ output, journal figures and matplotlib PDFs drop straight in.

Build hooks

A > build: line in the settings block runs a shell command from the deck folder before every compile (and on every save in revealer serve):

> title: My talk
> build: python figs.py

Use it to regenerate plots from data. Hooks time out after 300 s and a failing hook aborts the build with its output shown.

Theme-matched matplotlib styles

Every theme ships a palette-matched matplotlib style next to its CSS, copied into each deck at reveal.js/dist/theme/<theme>.mplstyle (large slide-ready fonts, theme color cycle, no chartjunk):

# figs.py
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.style.use("reveal.js/dist/theme/revealer.mplstyle")

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 4))
ax.plot(x, y, label="theory")
ax.set_xlabel(r"$t/\tau$")
ax.legend()
fig.savefig("Media/decay.pdf")

> build: python figs.py

=== Results
! decay.pdf

The figure inherits the deck’s colors and stays legible from the back of the room; the PDF→SVG conversion keeps it vector all the way to the screen.