Speaker Notes in Markdown: Write What You'll Say Right Under Each Slide

Use speaker notes in Markdown when a slide needs an explanation you want to say aloud rather than add to the visible text. A revenue chart might need a reminder that a March dip came from a billing change. Put that cue below the slide’s content so it can be reviewed alongside the figures and exported with the deck.

How speaker notes in Markdown are marked

In the ToSlides Markdown editor, slides are separated by a line containing only ---. Within a slide, a line that starts with Note: marks the point where the visible content stops. Everything after it, until the next separator, is speaker notes. A line starting with ??? does the same job, if you are used to that convention from other Markdown slide tools.

## Monthly revenue

- January flat
- March dip of 8%
- April back above trend

Note: The March dip is the billing migration, not churn.
Say this before anyone asks. Then move to April quickly.

---

## What we change next

The audience sees the title and three bullets. The two sentences underneath are stored as notes, not as slide text. Opening the notes overlay shows them on the presentation screen.

Cues or a full script?

For a talk delivered from cues, try short reminders instead of a paragraph for every slide. A note that says "billing migration, not churn, say it before they ask" will catch your eye mid-sentence. A longer paragraph may be harder to find your place in when you glance back at the screen. Good notes tend to be short: the one fact you are afraid of forgetting, the number you need exactly, and how you get to the next slide. If a transition is easy to forget, write the next question as a cue, such as “so what does that cost us?” before a cost breakdown.

There are times when a full script is the right call. A recorded video, a talk in a second language, a statement where the wording has been agreed with legal, or the opening thirty seconds when nerves are at their worst. In those cases write it out in full, but keep it to the slides that need it. The online teleprompter is a better fit than presenter notes for anything you plan to read word for word, since it scrolls the text past a reading line at a speed you set.

Seeing your notes while you present

The Markdown editor can present your draft full screen. Press N in presenter mode and the notes for the current slide appear on that same screen. Use this for rehearsal; the overlay is visible to anyone viewing or screen-sharing that display. That makes it easy to rehearse straight from the draft before you have exported anything.

If you export to HTML, you get a single file that navigates with the arrow keys and has its own notes overlay, so the same notes travel with you in one file you can open on any laptop. Export to PPTX and the notes are written into PowerPoint's notes pane for each slide. Presenter view in PowerPoint reads from that pane, so your cues show up on your screen while the audience sees only the slides. The same .pptx also opens in Keynote and Google Slides if that is what the venue machine runs.

Rehearsing from the notes

Run through the deck once with notes visible and say everything out loud. You will find slides where the note is longer than what you actually say, and slides where you improvise something better than what you wrote. Update the notes with the wording or cue that worked during rehearsal. If timing matters, paste your notes into the speech time calculator for a rough length estimate, or use the slide timer to compare elapsed time with your plan. Record actual section times yourself if you need a more detailed rehearsal log. A note that reads well on screen can still take ninety seconds to say.

Keeping notes in version control

Because the notes sit inside the same text file as the slides, they get committed, diffed and reviewed together. When a colleague changes a number on slide nine, the note explaining that number is right there in the same pull request, and a reviewer can see if the two have drifted apart. A normal text diff does not provide the same review of a .pptx; open the file and inspect the relevant slides and notes together. A reasonable habit is to treat the Markdown as the source until the content settles, then export once.

If you would rather not start from a blank page, the separate AI generation feature drafts speaker notes for every slide, though it requires signing in and uses credits. Whether you start from generated notes or write them yourself, check every number and rewrite cues you would not naturally say aloud.

What this can't do yet

Notes are plain text and remain accessible inside the exported file. The browser notes overlay appears on the same presentation screen, so a shared display shows it too; it is not a private second-screen presenter view. Browser drafts do not sync or support shared editing. AI generation requires account credits; the browser writing tools are free without sign-in.