What formats can a vault be exported to?
Three, for three different audiences.
ZIP gives you the vault as it is — base.md plus the notes/ directory — for yourself, or for another tool.
PDF gives you a document, at one of two levels of detail. PowerPoint gives you a .pptx file you can open and edit like any other deck.
What is the difference between the two PDF levels?
Summary renders each note's summary; full renders the notes in full.
They are genuinely different documents rather than one with a font-size change. The summary version is the briefing — a vault of eighty notes becomes something a person can read on a train. The full version is the reference document.
In both cases the material follows the table of contents, so the numbering you see in the app is the numbering in the document.
What does the deck actually look like?
Slides in table-of-contents order, following the chapter tree, with a choice of fifteen themes.
The themes come in three families of five. Five are plain — typography and space. Five carry a graphic layer: a side band, a header, a split, a corner, a card. Five carry an illustration drawn in code, in five subject flavours: electronics, industry, laboratory, Caribbean and medicine.
The illustrations are drawn programmatically and embedded, rather than pulled from a stock library, which is why they are consistent across a deck of forty slides instead of five photos and thirty-five blanks.
Does my original conversation end up on a slide?
No, and that is a firm rule in both export modes.
The source material — the full original question and the full original answer — never appears in a presentation. It is evidence for you, not content for an audience, and a slide carrying a raw transcript is worse than no slide.
So what goes out is the note as written: the title, and depending on the mode the summary or the expansion.
Why does exporting produce something coherent rather than a pile of slides?
Because the ordering problem was solved incrementally. Every note picked a chapter when it was created, and the chapter tree has been maintained since.
Export is therefore a rendering step, not a structuring step. Tools that store flat notes have to invent an order at export time, which is why their output reads like a list.
The corollary is worth knowing: improving the table of contents improves the export. If a deck comes out badly ordered, rebuild the tree and export again rather than reordering slides.
How much editing does the output need?
Expect to cut. The export is a complete, correctly ordered draft of everything in the vault, and a good deck is usually a subset.
What you are saved is the part that takes the evening: deciding the order, writing a summary line per section, and getting consistent formatting across forty slides.
The .pptx is a real PowerPoint file, so cutting and rearranging happens in the tool you already use.
Are the fonts going to break on someone else's machine?
In the PDF, no — the font is embedded in the file. That is a deliberate choice, because the classic failure of generated PDFs is diacritics turning into boxes on a machine that lacks the font.
A PowerPoint file follows PowerPoint's rules and uses fonts available where it is opened, as any deck does.
For anything going outside your organisation, the PDF is the safer format for exactly this reason.
Can I export just part of a vault?
Export works at vault level, so the way to get a subset is to shape the vault or edit afterwards.
In practice, editing the exported file is usually faster than reorganising a vault for one deliverable, and it leaves your vault organised for thinking rather than for one presentation.
If you find yourself exporting the same subset repeatedly, that is a signal it should be its own vault — and the ZIP export plus a folder move is how you make that happen.
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