Concepts

Vocabulary

On this website, we will refer to the different components of a slide deck in these terms:

• Slide: one unit of a presentation.
• Deck: a sequence of slides.
• Cell: a named area that holds content.
• Grid: the arrangement of cells you build yourself, with horizontal and vertical splits.
• Split: a horizontal or vertical division between cells, built with columns or rows.
• Track: the width or height assigned to one child of a split.
• Inset: space between a cell’s edge and its content.
• Plane: a full-slide layer drawn outside the grid. Every slide has two.
• Background: the plane drawn behind the grid.
• Foreground: the plane drawn over the grid.
• Layout: a grid Mosaic already built for a familiar slide kind, supplying fixed content or decoration when that kind needs it.
• Variant: a named alternative arrangement offered by a layout.
• Component: a reusable piece of slide content such as a callout, quote, or badge.
• Theme: a coordinated set of colors, text styles, and layouts.
• Step: one stage of a slide that reveals or replaces content incrementally. Each step renders as its own frame.
• Frame: one page of the compiled document; a slide built from several steps spans several frames.

Anatomy of a slide deck

The grid is sandwiched between two full-slide planes. The background plane is painted behind the cells. It typically holds a full-slide image, a color wash, or a watermark. The foreground plane is painted over the cells. It typically holds a slide number, a logo, or a progress indicator. Neither plane takes space away from the grid. The Background and Foreground pages show how to use them.

Where a grid is the structure you build, a layout is one Mosaic has already built for a familiar slide kind. Mosaic ships layouts for content, titles, sections, and images each offers several named variants of its arrangement. Custom slides build a grid instead.

Every cell, the background, and the foreground is a native Typst layer, and each one carries a label: <mosaic-cell-ID>, <mosaic-background>, and <mosaic-foreground>. Ordinary Typst show and set rules can therefore style every part of a slide. See Styling cells for a detailed tutorial.