Glossary

The words, defined.

63 terms in two halves — the craft vocabulary of presentations, which is older than any software, and the vocabulary of this format. Definitions only; the rules live on the pages each entry points to.

Deck craft

Vocabulary that predates this product and outlives it. Useful whatever you build decks with.

16:9: The widescreen slide proportion every modern projector and screen expects. unPaper's decks are 1280×720 pixels per slide, which is 16:9 at a size that prints cleanly.
Action title: A slide headline that states the conclusion rather than the topic — “Margin fell because freight doubled”, not “Margin analysis”. A deck whose titles read in sequence as an argument can be understood from the titles alone.See also So-what, Storyline
Agenda ladder: A recurring contents slide that marks where you are in the deck, dimming the sections already covered. It costs a slide per section and buys an audience that never wonders how much is left.
Appendix: Slides kept after the closing slide to answer questions rather than to be presented. Moving detail here is usually what lets the main deck respect a one-idea-per-slide budget.See also Budget
Bleed: Artwork that runs to the very edge of the slide with no margin. In a printed deck it needs the printer's bleed allowance; on screen it is simply a full-width band.See also Safe area
Build: Revealing a slide's content in stages across several clicks. Builds do not survive a PDF, and are one reason a deck that reads well on screen can be unreadable as a file.
Callout: A short highlighted block that lifts one sentence out of the surrounding slide — a risk, a caveat, or the number everything else supports.Pattern library
Chart junk: Decoration on a chart that carries no information: gradients, 3-D bars, drop shadows, redundant gridlines. Edward Tufte's term, and still the fastest audit of a chart.
Closing slide: The deliberate last slide: the ask, the decision required, or the next step. A deck that ends on its final content slide ends by running out rather than by arriving.
Deck: A set of slides treated as one document. The word matters here because unPaper's unit of work is the deck — one HTML file — not the individual slide.
Divider: A near-empty slide carrying only a section name, used to mark a change of subject. On screen it gives the audience a beat; in a printed deck it is the visible table of contents.
Driver tree: A branching diagram decomposing one metric into the things that move it — revenue into price and volume, and so on down. Used to show where a number can actually be influenced.Pattern library
Executive summary: One slide near the front carrying the whole argument, written so that a reader who stops there has still received the point. Usually the last slide written and the first one read.
Harvey ball: A small circle filled by quarters to show a rating at a glance. Common in option comparisons because a column of them reads faster than a column of words.
Kicker: The small line above a slide title — a section name, a date, a category. It orients the reader before the headline does, and is called an eyebrow in some houses.
MECE: Mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive: a way of checking that a list's items do not overlap and that together they cover the whole subject. A consulting habit, and a good one.See also Pyramid principle
Pull quote: A short quotation set large enough to be the slide. Effective exactly once in a deck; twice and it stops being emphasis.
Pyramid principle: Barbara Minto's structure: state the answer first, then the arguments supporting it, then the evidence under each. It is why business decks lead with the conclusion instead of building toward it.See also Action title, MECE
Quadrant: A two-by-two grid placing items against two axes — effort against impact, reach against cost. Its power and its danger are the same: it forces a position on things that may not have one.Pattern library
RAG board: A status view marking each item red, amber or green. Standard in project reporting because it survives being read from the back of a room.Pattern library
Roadmap: A grid allocating named work to named periods. Distinct from a track, which measures a continuous scale — a roadmap answers “when”, a track answers “how far”.See also Track
Safe area: The margin inside a slide that content stays within, so nothing is clipped by a projector, a video crop or a printer. Respecting it is most of what makes a deck look professional at the back of a room.
Slide master: In PowerPoint, the template layer defining a layout's placeholders, fonts and colours. Decks built on real masters stay consistent when someone else edits them; decks built by hand do not.Company template
Small multiples: The same small chart repeated across categories on one slide, on shared axes. Almost always clearer than one chart carrying six series.
So-what: The implication a slide's data actually carries. A slide that shows a chart and stops has left the so-what to the audience, who will each supply a different one.See also Action title
Speaker notes: Text attached to a slide for the presenter and not shown to the audience. They survive conversion to PowerPoint, which makes them the right place for what would otherwise become a fifth bullet.
Storyline: The sequence of claims a deck makes, independent of how the slides look. Written as a list of action titles before any slide exists, it is the cheapest place to discover the argument does not work.See also Action title, Arc
Track: A bar marking a span on a continuous scale — a range, a period covered, progress against a target. A track measures a span; a path marks instants.Pattern librarySee also Roadmap
Waterfall: A chart showing how a starting figure becomes an ending figure through named increases and decreases. The standard way to answer “where did the money go”.Pattern library
Z-pattern: The path an eye takes across a sparse slide: top-left, top-right, down to bottom-left, bottom-right. Placing the conclusion off that path is the most common reason it goes unread.

The unPaper system

What the format and its tools call things. If you are an AI agent reading this before writing a deck, this half is the lexicon you want.

Arc: The job a deck is doing, named as a verb — decide, persuade, align, instruct, account for, explain. The arc determines which slides a deck needs before any content exists.See also Spine, Storyline
Brief: The optional description of your topic, audience, length and tone that is folded into the prompt. It never leaves your browser; it is assembled into the text you copy.Create slides
Budget: The limits the prompt places on a slide — words per bullet, bullets per slide, one idea per slide, split if full. Budgets are the part of the contract that most changes what a model produces.See also Contract
Byte law: The rule that the template you preview, the file you download and the example inside the prompt are the same bytes. It is what makes “what you saw is what your AI is taught” checkable rather than claimed.
Capsule: The internal package that applies one Inspiration's surfaces, shapes and rhythm to compatible reference slides. Capsule is an implementation term; Inspiration is the public choice.Model inspirationsSee also Dialect, Inspiration
Card: One entry in the slide library: an element, in a role, with a worked example. Cards are what the prompt is assembled from, which is why inventory grows without any converter work.See also Element, Role
Company template: Your organization's visual language captured as a reusable local template and saved in your browser, so every prompt afterwards teaches your AI your format.Company template
Conformance: Whether a deck actually obeys the format: intact styles and page rules, self-contained, notes present, nothing truncated. Checkable on any file, including one unPaper did not produce.Check a deck
Contract: The rules block in the prompt: the named layouts, the budgets, the geometry and the output format. It is the thing that turns “write me a deck” into a request a model can satisfy consistently.The formatSee also Budget, Element
Deck type: What kind of presentation you are making — General, Corporate, Design, Editorial or Status. It determines the structural family available to the Reference kit, not its visual language.Create slidesSee also Inspiration, Reference kit
Depth: How much example the prompt carries. Essential is the default everywhere: users grow a deck on purpose and are never handed a large one by accident.
Dialect: The visual tendencies observed in a model's own uninstructed slide generations. It is research evidence; a named Inspiration is the reusable product choice distilled from it.Model inspirationsSee also Capsule, Inspiration, Model study
Element: A named layout primitive the prompt teaches — a waterfall, a track, a scorecard, a plot. An element earns its place only after it survives conversion to PowerPoint as native shapes.Pattern librarySee also Card, Native shape
Example deck: A complete fictional presentation you can inspect as finished HTML and editable PowerPoint, with a setup you can reuse. It is an output example, not a Reference kit or family catalogue.Example decksSee also Family showcase, Reference kit
Family showcase: A full catalogue demonstrating what one Deck type can render. It shows the family's vocabulary and is not presented as a finished presentation.Example decksSee also Deck type, Example deck
Fit box: The region a slide's content must fit inside. Content that overflows it is a defect that renders — it looks fine on screen and breaks in print — so it is caught by a check rather than by eye.See also Safe area
Flattened: Converted to a picture instead of to editable objects. A flattened slide looks right and cannot be edited, so the converter's quality is measured by how little it flattens.See also Native shape
Inspiration: A reusable visual language for the Reference kit. It changes how compatible worked examples look and which versions they prefer; it does not change which AI you use.Model inspirationsSee also Dialect, Look, Reference kit
Look: The refinements applied to an Inspiration: light or dark surface, theme, accent, background, header, footer and brand details. It does not change Deck type or Purpose.See also Deck type, Inspiration, Purpose
Model study: The preserved source research behind an Inspiration: what a model produced without unPaper, the dated probe, measurements and lineage. It is evidence, not a finished-output gallery.Model inspirationsSee also Dialect, Inspiration
Native shape: In a converted PowerPoint, a real movable object — a text box, a rectangle, a vector icon — rather than part of a background image. The whole point of converting rather than exporting a picture.HTML → PowerPointSee also Flattened
Offline session: A deliberate, reversible state in which the saved copy of unPaper refuses all of its own network requests and runs from cache. A prepared browser, not a private deployment.On your device
Pattern: One professional slide structure, such as a waterfall, scorecard or roadmap. A pattern is an atomic building block, not a finished deck or visual language.Pattern librarySee also Element, Example deck
Pin: A slide you have explicitly chosen to keep in the prompt's example set. Its opposite is an exclusion. Both override what the matcher would have inferred.
Provenance: An optional marker recording that a deck was built to this format. It records the format, never the content, and can be turned off.
Purpose: What the deck must accomplish — Decide, Persuade, Explain, Teach, Report or Align. Purpose shapes which worked examples are selected; it does not set the visual language or slide count.Create slidesSee also Arc, Deck type, Inspiration
Reference kit: The rules and selected worked slide examples sent to your AI inside the copied prompt. It teaches the requested deck; it is neither your finished deck nor a public Example deck.Create slidesSee also Example deck, Inspiration, Purpose
Role: What a slide is doing in the deck — opening, evidence, comparison, status, ask, closing. The same element in two roles is two different cards.See also Card, Element
Skin: A purely visual treatment applied over the same structure — the styling half of a template, separated so that a layout only has to be built once.See also Look, Deck type
Slide kit: What you copy: the rules, your brief and a worked example, assembled into one message for your AI. Nothing in it is uploaded; assembling it is the whole of what unPaper does before the deck exists.The prompt
Spine: The slots a deck of a given arc must fill — an opening, the evidence, a closing — before optional slides are considered. An unfilled spine slot is a hole the assembler is not allowed to leave.See also Arc
Template: The self-contained source file carrying unPaper HTML rules and worked reference slides. It is a technical artifact, not the name of a Deck type, Inspiration or finished Example deck.The formatSee also Deck type, Example deck, Inspiration, unPaper HTML
unPaper HTML: The published format itself: a fixed-geometry 16:9 deck in one self-contained HTML file, designed backwards from what converts cleanly into an editable PowerPoint.The format

The rules themselves are on the format page, and every layout named here has a live example in the pattern library.