Fern Hush Slides

Make calm, illustrated decks for talks that ask people to slow down and look, such as library and reading programmes, garden and nature projects, community learning and seasonal reports: flat leaf-and-figure illustrations, script titles over a plain serif and one small idea per page.

Fern Hush Slides

Bring the topic, the audience, the facts and records to use exactly and the page count; pictures optional. The Skill returns one offline HTML deck that edits in the browser and exports editable PowerPoint.

How it works

  1. Brief and sequence

    Your Agent asks for the topic, the audience, what should happen after the talk, the facts and numbers to use exactly and the page count, then gives every page one layout and picks one palette.

  2. Pictures and build

    Without your own pictures it lists the items in art.json and draws them with fern-art.py. It writes plan.json and settings.json, then runs kit.py compose, make-deck.py and verify-deck.py to build one offline HTML file.

  3. Look and export

    It opens every page in a browser and checks wraps, overlaps and labels, tries edit, undo, save and present, then exports PowerPoint and runs verify-pptx.py against the deck.

Frequently asked questions

Is the PowerPoint really editable?

Yes. Titles, paragraphs, captions, panels, rules and table cells are native PowerPoint objects with speaker notes, and each illustration is its own picture. The only page-size picture is the scene illustration, which sits under separate editable text boxes. Copies with all text removed and with every picture replaced confirmed that text and pictures are separate.

Where do the pictures come from?

Your own pictures first. Otherwise the bundled fern-art.py draws flat illustrations from a short item list: leaf canopies, potted plants, trees, people standing, sitting or walking, cats, birds, bees, hives, lamps, cups, books, windows and landscapes. It uses only the Python standard library and calls no model or image service.

Which fonts does it use?

Parisienne for script titles and Spectral for text, both under the SIL Open Font License. Install both on the presenting machine for matching line breaks. Chinese, Japanese and Korean use the system face because the script font has no CJK glyphs.

What are the known limits?

Layout geometry is fixed and titles have word budgets; text far over budget is not shrunk, so a very long cover title can push the subtitle off the page. Long Chinese chapter titles in the narrow right column can leave one character on its own line; break them by phrase. In PowerPoint each picture moves, crops and is replaced as a whole.

What was tested?

Both example decks were built from a fresh unzip of the package. Every page was inspected in Chrome and in a LibreOffice render of the exported PowerPoint, 31 browser interaction checks passed on each deck and 25 error-path checks passed, and python-pptx edits survived save and reopen. PowerPoint, Keynote and WPS were not opened.