Making a Manim Slide Deck

Its really easy to make a full powerpoint slide deck that is animated using Manim.

Setup

Install the community edition of Manim using these instructions The following are commands for MacOS:

brew install py3cairo ffmpeg
brew install --cask mactex
pip3 install manim

Install the package that allows us to make pptx out of manim slides

python3 -m pip install manim-pptx

Now you should be set to go.

Coding

Lets make an example of three slides:

• A title slide
• A table of contents
• A square to circle animation

Normally this code looks like this:

from manim import *
from manim_pptx import *

class TitleSlide(PPTXScene):
  def construct(self):

      main_title = Tex(r"Cool Anims")
      main_title.shift(0.5*UP)
      authors = Tex(r"Devansh Agrawal", font_size=36)
      authors.shift(1.5*DOWN)

      title_short = Title(r"Demos")

      self.play(
            Write(main_title),
            FadeIn(authors)
      )
      self.endSlide()
    
      self.play(
        Transform(main_title, title_short),
        FadeOut(authors),
      )
      self.endSlide()

class TOC(PPTXScene):
    def construct(self):
        title_short = Title(r"Demos")
        self.add(title_short)

        blist = BulletedList("Title", "Table of Contents", "Simple Animation")

        self.play(FadeIn(blist))
        self.endSlide()

class SquareToCircle(PPTXScene):
    def construct(self):
        circle = Circle()
        square = Square()
        square.flip(RIGHT)
        square.rotate(-3 * TAU / 8)
        circle.set_fill(PINK, opacity=0.5)

        self.play(Create(square))
        self.endSlide()
        self.play(Transform(square, circle))
        self.endSlide()
        self.play(FadeOut(square))
        self.endSlide()

and (assuming it was saved to a file called slides.py) you would compile and generate the videos and powerpoint by doing

manim -pqh slides.py -a

where the -p means you want a preview, -qh means high quality and -a means to run this for all the scenes.

The output of this, unfortunately, is three separate pptx files, which you will have to manually combine together.

INSTEAD,

Instead, we can ask manim to combine everything together for us in one shot:

We add the following to the end of slides.py:

# define the set of slides you want
slides = [
    TitleSlide,
    TOC,
    SquareToCircle
]


class Slides(*slides):

    def setup(self):
        # setup each scene
        for s in slides:
            s.setup(self)

    def construct(self):
        # play each scene
        for s in slides:
            s.construct(self)
            # if there are any objects left at the end of the animation, remove them!
            if len(self.mobjects) >= 1:
                self.remove(*self.mobjects)

which essentially goes through, sets up each animation, and then constructs them in the sequence you have defined. It creates a single scene effectively, which means you get a single pptx file out!

To run this, simply run

manim -pqh slides.py Slides

which will generate a single final ppt file called Slides.pptx

Extra tip: If you want to add slide numbers, this might be a good spot!