explorable-deck

Explorable deck

Build a Quarto reveal.js deck that teaches the way a good explorable does, but inside the frame a talk imposes: linear, timed, driven by a presenter, 1280×720 with no scrolling. The explorable's non-linear tree becomes a spine of counted slides plus an appendix of side rooms. Its playables become stages the presenter operates while talking. Its "static read must work" becomes: the printed PDF must carry the argument on its own.

The sibling skill explorable-explanations builds the website version, and explorable-beamer builds the same deck in LaTeX beamer for a user who names Beamer, LaTeX, TeX or PDF. This one produces a Quarto deck, and it reuses the website's models and numbers when one already exists for the topic.

What you produce

One folder per deck, rendered with quarto render index.qmd:

<deck>/
  index.qmd            the deck: YAML header, one `##` per slide, `::: {.notes}` on every slide
  theme/deck.scss      tokens, faces, layouts, the stage, controls, figure frames
  theme/fonts.html     the three web fonts (system fallbacks in the theme)
  js/lib.js            drawing helpers and L.DATA, the single home of every number a chart uses
  js/deck-charts.js    the stages: CH['name'] = (el, {animate}) => cleanup
  js/include.html      the script tags Quarto appends to the body
  figs/*.svg           the source's figures, converted from PDF and recoloured (build output)
  figs/convert_figs.sh, figs/restyle_figs.py
  shoot_chrome.py      screenshots every slide, prints console messages
  README.md            how to render, check, present; where the numbers come from
  plan.md              the talk script (see below)

scripts/new_deck.sh <path> copies the template in assets/template/ and the scripts into place. Start every new deck from it: the template already solves the reveal.js traps listed in the notes reference.

Read first

1. The Explorable Explanations Playbook: Nicky Case, Bret Victor, Steven Strogatz. Read §1–4 and §10 closely and skim the rest once per project. It explains why the craft rules exist so you can apply them with judgment. Its three-act arc, ladder of abstraction, empathy for the perplexed reader, and message → mechanics apply to a talk unchanged. Its §6 (interaction craft) and §9 (the frontier) describe the website; for a talk, the interaction section of deck-craft.md overrides them.
2. Deck craft: how the explorable craft translates to slides, and what goes wrong. Read before planning, and again when reviewing.
3. Quarto and reveal.js notes: the template's layout vocabulary, the stage API, the figure pipeline, rendering, screenshots, PDF export, and the traps. Read before building.
4. Look at the four screenshots in references/example-deck/ of a finished deck built this way (a hook with two characters, an animated reveal stage, a paper figure beside prose, a coefficient plot), and at Case's Evolution of Trust for the broader vibe. The example deck is a housing-returns paper (Bäckman, D'Lima and Khorunzhina, "Anna and Bo"); if the source is that paper or a neighbour of it, borrow nothing from the examples but the register. For any topic, take the register, not the content: the topic decides the colours, the characters and the shapes.