aperrault

Claude Keynote Skill — Development skill for Claude Code

Development community

Claude Code skill: read, render and edit Apple Keynote decks, including the LaTeX of every equation.

How to install Claude Keynote Skill

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open aperrault/claude-keynote-skill and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What Claude Keynote Skill does

Claude Code skill: read, render and edit Apple Keynote decks, including the LaTeX of every equation.

Alternatives in Development

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Obsidian MCP Server — Read, write, search, and surgically edit Obsidian vault notes, tags, and frontmatter via MCP 686 ★
Compiletex — Compile LaTeX and report errors/warnings 446 ★

README

claude-keynote-skill

A [Claude Code](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code) skill for reading, rendering and editing Apple Keynote decks on macOS — including the LaTeX of every equation, which no AppleScript interface exposes.

Two layers, used together:

	`scripts/keynote.py`	`scripts/keynote_iwa.py`
mechanism	AppleScript/JXA against the running Keynote	edits the `.key` package directly (via keynote-parser)
reads	text, presenter notes, layouts, images, geometry; renders slides to JPEG	text with inline $latex$ , every equation's source
writes	notes, plain text, text boxes, images, slides (add / move / delete / rebuild), sizes	equation LaTeX (edit and create), text that contains math, paragraph/list styles
needs Keynote	open (opens it for you)	closed — refuses to run otherwise

Why the package layer: each Keynote equation is a rendered PDF plus its LaTeX source; Keynote re-typesets from the source on open, so editing math is editing a string, and new equations need no PDF. Details in `SKILL.md`.

Install

git clone https://github.com/aperrault/claude-keynote-skill ~/.claude/skills/keynote

Requirements: macOS with Keynote (tested on Keynote 15.1.1; keynote-parser officially supports ≤ 14.5 but round-trips 15.x decks), Python 3.11+, and [`uv`](https://docs.astral.sh/uv/) (the package layer runs as `uv run --with keynote-parser --with pyyaml python scripts/keynote_iwa.py …`). The first AppleScript call prompts for Automation permission.

Safety

This tool rewrites presentation files, so it is built around not losing work:

every package edit backs the deck up first; mutating AppleScript commands keep a rolling backup (keynote.py backups DECK lists them);
save/close wait until the bytes are on disk and fail loudly if Keynote did not write (Keynote's save is asynchronous — a close right after a save can cancel the wri