vexy-dexypy

vexy-dexypy turns a web page into slide decks. It takes one URL or local HTML file, works out where the slides inside the page should break, and renders the page to PDF through several engines in parallel. Each engine writes its own folder of single-page PDFs. You compare the folders and build your final deck from the best version of each slide.

No two engines paginate a page the same way. A Webflow hero often looks best through Chromium, while a documentation page often looks best through a CSS paged-media engine. vexy-dexypy runs the engines side by side and leaves the choice to you.

What goes in, what comes out

Input

An http:// or https:// URL, or a path to a local .html file.

Output

A folder per page under out/, with one sub-folder per rendering strategy and a _meta/ folder that records the slide plan and the run summary.

For vexy-dexypy build https://www.vexy.art/lines/ the result looks like this (the folder name is a slug derived from the URL):

out/www-vexy-art-lines/
  raw/            index.html                 # the fetched page
  normalized/     normalized.html            # slide-shaped sections
  playwright/     01-slide.pdf  02-slide.pdf  …  index.html
  reveal/         01-slide.pdf  …  index.html
  vivliostyle/    01-slide.pdf  …  index.html
  _meta/          page.json  slideplan.json  run-summary.json

A strategy that fails becomes a warning in the summary table. The run still writes the decks that worked.

The six stages

1. Read: fetch the page (or copy the local file).
2. Analyze: recognize the page builder (Webflow, MkDocs Material, and others) and plan slide breaks at the target stage size.
3. Normalize: restructure the DOM into slide-shaped <section> elements, in the browser, with the bundled vexy-dexyjs preprocessor.
4. Prepare: write the paged-media CSS, reveal.js, impress.js or Marp wrapping that each engine expects.
5. Render: export a combined PDF through every selected engine.
6. Write: split each PDF into numbered single-page files, optionally convert them to SVG, and write an HTML preview.

Architecture follows one page through every stage.

Where to go next

• Installation: Python, Chromium and the optional engines.
• Quick start: your first build, step by step.
• Command line: every command and flag.
• Configuration: vexy-dexypy.toml keys and precedence.
• Engines: what each strategy does and what it needs.
• Extending: add readers, importers or exporters as plugins.
• Troubleshooting: common failures and fixes.
• Contributing: development setup, tests and releases.

Licence

See the LICENSE file in the repository. Some engines vexy-dexypy can call have their own licences: Vivliostyle is AGPL and Prince is proprietary. vexy-dexypy runs them as separate programs and does not link them.