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Lattice Lattice

What is Lattice?

You have been on the receiving end of slide decks where every slide is slightly different from the one before. The headline is in one font on page 4 and another on page 5. The accent blue drifts between two shades. A chart copied from a 2022 deck still says “FY22” in the corner. Nobody planned the drift — it happens because slide tools make every slide a blank canvas, and humans are humans.

Lattice is what you build when you want to stop that from happening.

The author writes the deck as a plain text file in Markdown — the same format GitHub READMEs use. For each slide, the author picks one of the named layouts (“split panel”, “verdict grid”, “big number”). The engine assembles the slide using those layouts and a shared color palette. Every deck looks like it came from the same team — because, structurally, it did.

Think of it this way: Lattice is to slide decks what Markdown was to writing on the web. A simple text source that produces something polished, repeatable, and easy to change.

See it first

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The repository ships with a gallery deck that shows every layout the engine knows. Open examples/gallery.pdf. That is the answer to “what does this actually produce?”. For an interactive tour of every layout — themable in any palette — see the component reference.

What you get

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  • A text file in, a polished PDF out. No dragging, no nudging, no alignment guides.
  • One palette, every deck. The brand colors live in one file. Change them once; every deck picks them up on the next build.
  • Themed diagrams. Flowcharts and other diagrams render with the deck’s palette automatically — no per-diagram styling.
  • Version control. A deck is text. A normal git diff shows what changed between revisions, the way it does for code.
  • Accessibility built in. Contrast is WCAG AA across every layout.
  • No service, no account, no telemetry. Lattice runs on your laptop or in your build system. Fully offline-capable.

A native vocabulary for every field

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The layouts aren’t generic boxes. You write plain Markdown — a list, a table, a fenced code block, an inline $x$ — and Lattice renders it in the notation your discipline already uses:

  • Mathematicians, quants, and ML researchers — KaTeX equations with Definition / Theorem / Proof cards, derivation chains that justify every step, matrix decompositions, and an equation set beside its plot.
  • Project leads — gantt charts, kanban boards, roadmaps, journeys, and step ladders, rendered as native SVG from a list. No Visio, no pasted screenshots.
  • Engineers and architects — all 25 Mermaid diagram types, themed to the deck, plus state charts and side-by-side code diffs.
  • Lawyers and compliance teams — statute stacks, authority chains, obligation matrices, citation cards, and regulatory-update layouts.
  • Analysts — radar, quadrant, KPI, stats, progress, pie, and word-cloud layouts that turn numbers into an argument.

Fifty-three layouts in all — and you reach every one of them with the same Markdown, never a new tool to learn.

What changes for…

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Boards and executives receive decks that look like one team made them — whether the author sat in finance, engineering, or legal. The argument lands without formatting drift competing for attention.

Authors stop fiddling with text boxes. They write the words, pick a layout, and the deck assembles itself.

Brand and design set the visual system once, in one file, and stop policing every deck individually.

Architects and SREs see a deterministic transform: same Markdown in, same PDF out. Standard Node.js runtime. Nothing to run in production.

InfoSec, risk, and procurement see a tool that takes no credentials, reads no network, holds no data, and is MIT-licensed. The output is a standard PDF. No lock-in: if your organization ever moves away from Lattice, every deck it produced still opens in any PDF reader.

What it isn’t

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Lattice produces documents, not stage performances. There are no animations, no slide transitions, no presenter timers. Use Keynote or Google Slides when you need stagecraft. Use Lattice when the deck has to read as well as it presents — board memos, briefing books, regulatory submissions, anything that gets emailed and stands on its own.

Two ways to use it

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  • From a terminal. Install Node.js, write Markdown, run one command, get a PDF. See Getting started.
  • From a desktop app. SlideWright is the editor application (under active development) that wraps the same Lattice engine for people who do not want to touch a terminal.

Where to go next

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