create-seminar

Create a Seminar presentation project with Vite. Requires Node.js 22 or newer.

npm create seminar@latest my-talk
cd my-talk
npm run preview

Choose which plugins to enable: Elements (callouts and columns), MathJax (math formulas), Pele (Mermaid diagrams), and Shiki (syntax highlighting). All four are selected by default. Then choose the default theme or an editable src/theme.ts, and whether to inline scripts and assets into each HTML file (on by default). Choose which PDFs npm run pdf saves: the slides (selected by default), handouts with notes, or handouts with 2, 4, or 6 slides on each sheet. With none selected, the project has no npm run pdf. Every project has npm run present, which builds the presentation and presents it with the presenter view, choosing the screen of the slides without browser prompts. Finally, choose whether to install dependencies now (yes by default). If you skip installation, run npm install before npm run preview.

The starter includes decks/index.deck.mdx with examples of the selected features, Vite and TypeScript configuration, and commands to preview, build, present, and check types. npm run preview opens the deck in the app of npm run present and updates it as you edit it; npm run dev serves it to a browser instead. Vite's root is decks/, so deck discovery only searches that directory. npm run build produces dist/index.html. By default, it is self-contained; when disabled, deploy the whole dist/ directory with its scripts and assets. Change selfContained in vite.config.ts to switch formats later.

build.outDir is ../dist relative to the Vite root, keeping build output in the project's dist/ directory. Components and fixtures can live in src/.

A custom theme uses createSlideTheme and imports Roboto's normal and italic weights explicitly. The project depends directly on @fontsource/roboto. The default-theme option uses @seminar/theme-default, which bundles Roboto. A custom theme is selected once with defaultTheme: '@/theme.ts' in the Seminar options of vite.config.ts; decks need no theme frontmatter.

Vite and TypeScript both map @/ to src/. For example, a deck can import @/MyComponent from src/MyComponent.tsx.

Command-line options

Supply all choices to skip interactive prompts:

npm create seminar@latest my-talk -- --plugins elements,mathjax --theme custom --self-contained --install

| Option | Meaning | | --------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | --plugins elements,mathjax,pele,shiki | Enable the listed plugins; use none or an empty string for no plugins | | --theme default | Use @seminar/theme-default | | --theme custom | Create an editable src/theme.ts with Roboto imports | | --self-contained | Inline scripts and assets into each HTML file (default) | | --no-self-contained | Keep scripts and assets in separate files | | --pdf slides,notes,2up,4up,6up | Save the listed PDFs with npm run pdf; use none for no PDFs (default: slides) | | --install | Install dependencies after creating the project (default) | | --no-install | Create files without installing dependencies | | -y, --yes | Use defaults: my-talk, all plugins, default theme, self-contained builds, PDFs of the slides, install dependencies | | -h, --help | Show usage | | -v, --version | Show the initializer version |

Use . as the directory to initialize the current directory. The destination must be new or empty; an existing .git directory or file is preserved. Existing project files are never overwritten. If installation fails, the generated files are kept and the command explains how to retry npm install.

Developing the initializer

From the Seminar repository, build it with npm run build:packages, then run:

node packages/create/dist/index.js /tmp/my-talk --plugins elements --theme custom --self-contained --no-install

Before the first npm release, generated projects refer to unpublished package versions. npm run release:smoke tests them against local release tarballs.