How to turn Markdown into a presentation — including PDF

A while back my friend shared a post about Marp on Twitter (now X). You specify the content using Markdown and the presentation builds itself. I saved the post and eventually got around to trying it. Visual Studio Code has a Marp plugin so you can see what you're writing in real time and export to PDF. Basically everything you need.

The thing is, presentations evolve and change — just like my previous ones, this one ended up on GitLab. And what if I didn't have to do a local build but could have GitLab build the presentation for me? After some digging I found a CI pipeline built specifically for Marp. It needed a few tweaks though. First, updating the Marp CLI version, then updating Chrome and Node.js. The harder part was PDF — the image being used didn't have fonts with Czech character support. I had to build my own.

I took an existing Alpine image and added Czech-supporting fonts to it, and voilà — a proper "ž" in my slides.