"Change template" answered "no slide layout" for 28 of the 41 presentations
in production: the theme lived only inside the deck JSON, and a presentation
whose deck reply failed twice and fell back to markdown slides had nowhere
to keep one. The theme is a column now, written at generation and by the
picker, and the markdown slide builder carries it to the same renderer field
a designed deck uses. A deck's own theme field is kept in step. Articles are
the only thing refused — they have no slides.
A deck reply that fails to parse is logged with its first 240 characters, so
the next "the reply was not a deck" can be read rather than guessed at.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Dv6sqaY6Vq3ChZHMem3cnU
Picking a theme on a saved resource did nothing. The picker saved the
choice, the route wrote deck.theme, and the renderer knew how to apply
it — the theme was lost in between.
attachFigures, the step that puts drawn figures back onto slides,
rebuilds the deck as a fresh object:
var out = { title, subtitle, date, slides };
A fresh object keeps only the fields it names, and theme was not one.
So every export rendered in the default palette, whatever the picker
said. Rendering the same deck under clinical-blue, teaching-amber and
high-contrast produced three byte-identical files; it now produces
three different ones, and they look different.
Silent, because nothing downstream could tell the difference between a
deck with no theme and a deck whose theme had been dropped — both mean
"use the default", which is also the right behaviour for an unknown id.
Known and not fixed here: the two tinted cards on a compare slide are
hardcoded blue and amber rather than taken from the theme, so those
stay the same colour under every palette. The headings, accent, rules
and bullets do change. That is a gap in the theme definition, not in
this path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Dv6sqaY6Vq3ChZHMem3cnU
