Never Build Slides from Scratch Again: How Paper2Slides Transforms Documents into Presentations in Minutes

Have you ever spent a sleepless night preparing for an academic talk or project review, staring at a blank slide deck? The process of distilling key points from dense papers, designing layouts, and finding the right visuals is mentally exhausting. If this sounds familiar, the tool we’re discussing today—Paper2Slides—could fundamentally change your workflow.

Imagine this: with a single command, the research paper, technical report, or document on your desktop is automatically converted into a well-designed, logically structured set of slides or an academic poster in just minutes. Does this sound too good to be true? This is precisely what Paper2Slides was built to do.

What is Paper2Slides?

In simple terms, Paper2Slides is an intelligent document conversion tool. It transforms your research papers, reports, and various documents into professional presentation slides and academic posters in a remarkably short time.

Its core mission is clear: to eliminate the need to build slides from scratch. Whether you’re rushing to prepare for next week’s lab meeting or creating a poster for an international conference, Paper2Slides can dramatically boost your productivity, freeing up time for more critical thinking and creative work.

What Makes It Stand Out?

Paper2Slides is not a simple text copier. It integrates advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology with intelligent layout algorithms to ensure the output is both accurate and visually appealing. Let’s explore its key features:

See It in Action: Paper2Slides Output Showcase

Seeing is believing. Paper2Slides comes with multiple built-in styles and can create unique visual themes based on your description.

Doraemon Style Poster

Academic Style Poster

Custom Totoro Style Poster

The image above showcases different poster styles generated from the same research paper. From left to right:

1. Doraemon Style: Bright, colorful, and friendly with illustrative elements, suitable for informal sharing sessions.
2. Academic Style: Clean, professional, and aligns with the formal aesthetics of academic conferences.
3. Custom Style: Here, a Studio Ghibli anime theme is used, featuring soft watercolor tones and the Totoro character.

The slide decks are equally impressive. You can generate a complete presentation with one command.

# Just one command to generate slides from a paper
python -m paper2slides --input paper.pdf --output slides --style doraemon --length medium

Want a more unique style? You can describe your vision using natural language:

--style "Studio Ghibli anime style with a warm, whimsical aesthetic. Use soft watercolor Morandi tones with a light cream background, muted sage green and dusty pink accents. The Totoro character can appear as a friendly guide relating to the content, with nature elements like soft clouds or leaves."

How to Get Started with Paper2Slides

Getting started with Paper2Slides is straightforward. You can dive in quickly via the command line or use the more user-friendly web interface.

Method 1: Command Line Interface (For Developers & Power Users)

If you’re comfortable with technology or prefer using the terminal, the CLI offers the most comprehensive and flexible control.

1. Environment Setup
First, you need to set up a Python environment and get the project code.

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/HKUDS/Paper2Slides.git
cd Paper2Slides

# Create and activate a conda environment (recommended)
conda create -n paper2slides python=3.12 -y
conda activate paper2slides

# Install all dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

Note: Remember to create a .env file in the paper2slides/ directory and add your necessary API keys. Refer to the paper2slides/.env.example file in the project for the required variables.

2. Basic Usage Commands
Once installed, generating slides becomes effortless.

# Basic usage: Generate medium-length slides from a paper
python -m paper2slides --input paper.pdf --output slides --length medium

# Generate a poster with a custom style
python -m paper2slides --input paper.pdf --output poster --style "minimalist with blue theme" --density medium

# Enable fast mode (skips RAG indexing, ideal for short documents)
python -m paper2slides --input paper.pdf --output slides --fast

# Enable parallel generation for faster processing (uses 2 workers by default)
python -m paper2slides --input paper.pdf --output slides --parallel 2

Quick Reference Table of Common Command Options:

Method 2: Web Interface (For All Users)

If you prefer a point-and-click experience, Paper2Slides provides an intuitive web interface.

# Start both backend and frontend services with one script
./scripts/start.sh

Once launched, access the interface by visiting http://localhost:5173 in your browser.

Through the web interface, you can easily upload files, select styles, adjust parameters, and preview results in real-time—all without touching a line of code.

The Intelligent Engine: How Does Paper2Slides Work?

Paper2Slides isn’t magic; it’s powered by a carefully designed, four-stage intelligent pipeline. Understanding this process helps you use it more effectively.

Stage 1: Intelligent Parsing & Indexing (RAG)
The tool first “reads” and parses all the documents you upload. Using RAG technology, it builds a smart index of the document content, acting as a private knowledge base. This ensures subsequent steps can accurately locate the most relevant information.

Stage 2: Deep Content Analysis
The system performs a deep analysis of the document structure, automatically identifying key sections, core arguments, all figures and tables, and understanding the logical relationships between them. This step creates a detailed “content map.”

Stage 3: Content Planning & Layout
Based on the analysis, Paper2Slides develops an optimal strategy for organizing and arranging content for your slides or poster. It decides what goes on the title slide, how to position charts, and how to structure the narrative flow.

Stage 4: Visual Generation & Rendering
Finally, following the planned blueprint and chosen style, the system calls upon image generation models to create the final slide pages or poster, compiling them into a usable PDF.

The entire process is interconnected and features a highly practical function: Smart Checkpoint Recovery. Each stage automatically saves a checkpoint file upon completion. This means if the generation process is interrupted for any reason (e.g., a network issue), you simply re-run the same command, and it will automatically resume from where it left off—no need to start over.

Normal Mode vs. Fast Mode: Which Should I Choose?

Paper2Slides offers two processing modes to suit different scenarios:

Simple Selection Guide:

• Use Normal Mode (the default) when you are not in a hurry and your document is long or complex for the best results.
• Use Fast Mode when you need a quick preview or your document is very short (fitting entirely within the model’s context window).

How-To: Configure and Manage Your Projects

Understanding the Output Structure

Paper2Slides organizes all generated files and intermediate data in a clear directory structure under outputs/. This makes it easy to find your presentations and manage different projects or versions.

outputs/
└── <project_name>/
    └── <content_type>/                   # 'paper' or 'general'
        └── <mode>/                       # 'fast' or 'normal'
            ├── checkpoint_rag.json       # RAG query results & parsed file paths
            ├── checkpoint_summary.json   # Extracted content, figures, tables
            ├── summary.md                # Human-readable summary
            └── <config_name>/            # e.g., slides_doraemon_medium
                ├── state.json            # Current pipeline state
                ├── checkpoint_plan.json  # Content plan for slides/poster
                └── <timestamp>/          # Generated outputs
                    ├── slide_01.png
                    ├── slide_02.png
                    ├── ...
                    └── slides.pdf        # Final PDF output

Leveraging the Checkpoint System

The checkpoint files are the key to the tool’s resilience and flexibility. They allow you to resume work and even change parameters mid-process without redoing everything.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What document formats does Paper2Slides support?

It supports multiple common formats including PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), PowerPoint (.pptx), and Markdown (.md). It can also process several files together in one go for consolidated output.

2. Is the output quality truly “professional”?

Paper2Slides is designed to produce materials ready for formal use. Its built-in academic style template follows common design conventions for international conference posters and presentations. Custom style quality depends on your descriptive prompt and the capabilities of the underlying image generation model. For most research talks and project reviews, the quality is entirely sufficient.

3. Do I need to know how to code to use this?

Not at all. The web interface provides full functionality through visual controls. The command-line method, while requiring typed commands, is supported by example commands that cover the vast majority of use cases—often just copy, paste, and modify a file name.

4. Can I edit a single slide if I’m not happy with it?

Currently, Paper2Slides focuses on the automated pipeline from document to final product. For fine-grained edits, it’s recommended to import the generated PDF into traditional presentation software like PowerPoint or Keynote for tweaking. However, you can easily regenerate the entire deck with adjusted parameters (like --style or --length).

5. Where are the files saved during processing?

All generated files and intermediate checkpoints are saved in the clearly organized outputs/ folder within the project’s root directory, making it easy to locate and manage your work history.

6. Are there any tips for getting the best image results?

Paper2Slides uses advanced image generation models. Practical experience suggests:

• Mood keywords (like “warm,” “elegant,” “vibrant”) strongly influence the overall color palette.
• Instructions about layout are followed well, but overly granular styling instructions for individual elements may not work as expected.
• Concise prompts often yield better results than long, complicated ones.
• To ensure consistency across multiple slides, the system uses an iterative single-image generation strategy rather than generating all images at once.

Exploring the Framework

For those interested in the underlying technology or considering contribution, Paper2Slides has a modular codebase.

Core Pipeline (paper2slides/core/): Orchestrates the 4-stage execution flow and manages the checkpoint state.
Document Processing (paper2slides/raganything/): Handles parsing of various file formats and builds the RAG index.
Content Analysis (paper2slides/summary/): Extracts document structure, figures, tables, and key content.
Generation Engine (paper2slides/generator/): Plans the slide/poster content and calls the image generation API.
Web Interface (api/, frontend/): A FastAPI backend paired with a React frontend for browser-based access.

This structured approach ensures reliability and makes the system easier to understand, maintain, and extend.

Final Thoughts

Paper2Slides represents a shift in perspective: it aims to free researchers and professionals from the tedious, time-consuming labor of slide creation, allowing them to focus on the content itself and the delivery. By combining cutting-edge document understanding, information retrieval, and visual generation, it provides a powerful new tool for academic communication and knowledge dissemination.

Whether you are a graduate student preparing for a thesis defense, an engineer who frequently delivers project reviews, or a faculty member needing to create conference posters, Paper2Slides is worth exploring. It may not completely replace your final polish of a presentation, but it will undoubtedly save you valuable hours on the initial drafting, giving you a more professional starting point.

Instead of struggling with a blank slide deck, let Paper2Slides build the first draft for you.