Overview
Research groups routinely need to pitch their work — to funders, partners, or
collaborators — yet pitch decks are almost never treated as reproducible
research artifacts: they are hand-assembled in proprietary slide tools,
contain unverifiable claims, and cannot be regenerated when the underlying
facts change. template_pitch_deck closes that gap. It generates six
artifacts from one token-resolved content source — short, medium, and long
decks, each in both PDF and PPTX — with every numeric claim traced back to a
live introspection of the repository it describes, every {{TOKEN}}
substitution verified to have actually landed, and every sentence checked
against a denylist of pitch-deck clichés.
The flagship content pitches template_template (../../template_template/), this
monorepo's own autopoietic meta-project, to a meta-science and
science-integrity audience — the kind of pitch an organization like the
Active Inference Institute or COGSEC would actually hand to a funder. The
rendering engine itself is new, reusable infrastructure:
infrastructure/rendering/slide_deck.py (ReportLab, PDF) and
infrastructure/rendering/pptx_deck.py (python-pptx) both consume the same
DeckContent model, so a PDF and a PPTX built from identical content carry
identical slide counts and identical text — verified by direct read-back of
both file formats, not by inspection.
Keywords: pitch deck, slide generation, reproducible research
communication, meta-science infrastructure, token validation, PPTX, PDF
rendering.
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Associated artifacts
GitHub release: v1.0.0 (https://github.com/docxology/template-pitch-deck/releases/tag/v1.0.0)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21281509
Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/21281509
PDF SHA-256: 66941950e2307d1e9717c0045f3db3196d7d2542c3f5ffceced00438f653c55b
Overview source: Curated paper metadata.
Methods and contributions
Read the source for the full argument, qualifications, and evidence.
Findings and contributions
- The tool generates six artifacts (short, medium and long decks, each as PDF and PPTX) from one token-resolved content source.
- PDF and PPTX decks built from identical content carry identical slide counts and text, verified by reading back both file formats rather than by inspection.
- Rendering is deterministic: given the same repository state, two consecutive runs produce byte-identical PDF and PPTX output, with generation time kept only in deck metadata.
- No LLM/Ollama stage is required, since deck content is authored and token-resolved rather than model-generated at render time, keeping artifacts deterministic.
- The flagship deck pitches template_template to a meta-science and science-integrity audience using problem, solution, proof (currently measured facts) and ask arc.
Methods
- Shared format-agnostic DeckContent/Slide content model with slide budgets — Defines Slide, DeckContent and SlideBudget (short <=10, medium <=22, long <=45 slides) consumed by both renderers, with a pure function truncating decks to a budget.
- Dual PDF (ReportLab) and PPTX (python-pptx) renderers with a parity test — Renders the same resolved content via ReportLab canvas onto 16:9 pages and via python-pptx, with a test asserting PDF page count equals PPTX slide count.
- {{TOKEN}} resolution against deck_tokens.yaml with fail-loud checks — Resolves {{TOKEN}} placeholders from a token file of facts read live from the pitched project, raising on any unresolved token and checking output for leftover braces.
- Word-boundary cliché denylist lint over every resolved slide — Runs a denylist of pitch-deck stock phrases (e.g. synergy, disrupt, 10x) across all slides at all three lengths before rendering, as part of an audit script.
- Negative-control fixtures proving validation gates fire — Uses deliberately broken token and cliché-laden fixtures to show each audit failure mode triggers before trusting that the real content passes.
Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.
PDF downloads
Archived files available directly from this site.
- Friedman_2026_Templatepitchdeck_66941950.pdf PDF · 0.06 MiB · declared primary
- template_template_pitch_long.pdf PDF · 0.57 MiB
- template_template_pitch_medium.pdf PDF · 0.49 MiB
- template_template_pitch_short.pdf PDF · 0.10 MiB
These files may be different versions or companion documents. The archive does not identify a latest edition.
Citation
Citation metadata follows the unified bibliography.
Catalog details and resources
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