A deliberately complicated presentation that AI struggles to make natively.
Gloss is the presentation itself: an open, deliberately complicated 20-slide challenge for presentation-generating AI. The goal is not to make screenshots that happen to look like slides. The goal is to make a real presentation: editable text, native charts and tables, working masters and layouts, live fields, connected shapes, correct reading order, and intentional grouping all the way down.
Gloss is not primarily a measurement tool. The deck is the challenge. A small checker and deeper measurement tools are bundled with it to make native quality easy to inspect, compare, and improve.
The name expands to Generative Layout & Object Structure Standard: a reminder that layout is visible, while object structure is what keeps a presentation real.
Open gloss.tools · Download the deck · Copy the exact prompt · Join the work
A screenshot is not a presentation. The artifact is the product.
Acid1, Acid2, and Acid3 gave every browser the same hostile public artifact. You did not need a white paper to see what the browser understood and what it did not.
Gloss is ACID for presentation decks made by AI. It publishes the hard artifact, the exact instructions, the reference renders, and the checks so anyone can inspect a result, find a failure, and improve the ecosystem.
Here, ACID refers to the browser conformance-test tradition—not database transactions. Gloss is the public project. Gloss v1 is its first bundled challenge suite.
- Download the native Gloss v1 deck.
- Move one object on one slide and a second object on another slide. Save it as
edited.pptx. - Run the checker. It reports those two native objects—one finding per object.
git clone https://github.com/aronchick/gloss.git
cd gloss/gloss-v1/grader
uv sync --extra dev --locked
uv run gloss check /path/to/edited.pptxAn untouched copy returns:
Exact match. No native objects changed.
Move two objects and it returns only two findings:
2 native objects changed:
Slide 02 · placeholder “Agenda” · changed: position
Slide 12 · placeholder “Document Fields” · changed: position
gloss check is the friendly front door: a strict native-object diff against the
public deck. The deeper gloss grade protocol remains available for rendered
comparison, semantic assertions, provenance, and release work.
Each slide isolates something that can look correct while being built incorrectly. Open any reference image, then inspect the corresponding canonical slide instructions.
Demonstrates: a cinematic title composition with an image, translucent shapes, and a master-driven footer. Tests natively: layout placeholders, image crop, z-order, opacity, shadow, and inherited slide numbers.
Demonstrates: a dense agenda that still reads cleanly. Tests natively: placeholder use, real bullet levels, paragraph spacing and indentation, flat grouping, and exact alignment.
Demonstrates: a formatted performance table with a connected annotation. Tests natively: a real table—not a pile of rectangles—plus cell styling, mixed border weights, paragraph indents, and connector placement.
Demonstrates: a data-rich chart with annotations and takeaways. Tests natively: an editable chart with correct source data, chart type, labels, gridlines, legend, overlay shapes, and arrow connectors.
Demonstrates: a repeatable card system. Tests natively: master and layout inheritance, grouped card objects, equal distribution, placeholders, and a footer that is inherited instead of manually copied.
Demonstrates: English, Arabic, and Japanese sharing one editorial canvas. Tests natively: RTL paragraph direction, CJK line breaking, script-specific fonts, exact Unicode text, and an intentional cross-column overlap.
Demonstrates: three treatments of approved source imagery. Tests natively: independent crop rectangles, circle and rounded-rectangle masks, asset identity, and a translucent overlay in the right z-order.
Demonstrates: a cascading stack with convincing depth. Tests natively: precise z-order, five opacity levels, shadows, selective grouping, and a real gradient fill.
Demonstrates: two code-heavy columns with deliberately different overflow behavior. Tests natively: fixed-size clipping versus auto-shrink, preserved whitespace, monospaced runs, exact indentation, and line spacing.
Demonstrates: a legible systems diagram. Tests natively: connectors that remain attached to shapes, elbow routing, arrowheads, grid alignment, labels, and nested backend groups.
Demonstrates: two rows of nearly identical swatches. Tests natively: the invisible semantic difference between theme-linked colors and explicit RGB overrides—the kind of distinction a screenshot cannot prove.
Demonstrates: live document metadata next to a static lookalike. Tests natively: slide-number and fixed-date fields, a master footer field, and the difference between a live field and typed text.
Demonstrates: chart, table, image, Arabic annotation, and dense callouts in one composition. Tests natively: multiple editable object types and their relationships surviving together.
Demonstrates: a mirrored Arabic/English comparison. Tests natively: right-to-left paragraphs, mixed bidirectional runs, script-aware fonts, and mirrored alignment without flattening text.
Demonstrates: typography at 0°, 45°, 90°, 135°, and 270°. Tests natively: real rotation values, anchor points, bounding boxes, and shapes aligned to rotated text.
Demonstrates: design elements that deliberately continue beyond the canvas. Tests natively: negative coordinates and overhanging geometry without clipping, normalizing, or “fixing” intentional overflow.
Demonstrates: a composition built from nested visual systems. Tests natively: three levels of groups, exact membership, child transforms, and z-order inside each nesting level.
Demonstrates: a three-column English/Japanese magazine layout. Tests natively: column structure, repeated image treatments, pull quotes, mixed-script text, and a patterned background.
Demonstrates: the deck’s design language as a consistency audit. Tests natively: master-derived typography, colors, spacing, line weights, and reusable layout behavior across the full document.
Demonstrates: the whole challenge in one dense synthesis. Tests natively: a chart, table, cropped image, Arabic and Japanese text, rotated type, transparent layers, connectors, fields, groups, and master inheritance at once.
The complete prompt is already assembled in one copyable file:
Open the exact Gloss v1 authoring prompt →
Give the AI that prompt together with:
- the 20 reference images;
- the approved assets;
- the bundled font set.
Do not give it the native gold deck. Ask for an editable native presentation,
save the result as .pptx, and run gloss check against it. The experiment is
intentionally reproducible: every instruction, reference, asset, and check is in
this repository.
Gloss is about native presentations across PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Keynote. The principle is format-independent: a chart should remain a chart, text should remain text, and layout behavior should survive editing.
Gloss v1 is honestly PPTX-first. OOXML is a published standard with an inspectable package and object structure, which makes independent local checking possible today. Google Slides and Keynote coverage should use the same public, artifact-first philosophy as their reliable inspection surfaces mature. Help us define those adapters in Issues.
The presentation is Gloss. The tools are its measuring instruments. The simple check answers the first question: what native objects changed? The bundled advanced grader can also inspect rendered pixels, typography, geometry, charts, tables, layouts, masters, text semantics, relationships, and package safety. They make the hard presentation easier to understand and improve; they are not the product’s identity.
The current candidate suite contains 280 schema-valid checks and generated operator fixtures. That evidence proves configured checker behavior, not an official model leaderboard. See GLOSS_OPENSPEC.md for the draft protocol and the public evidence bundle for the receipts.
Gloss v1 is public by design. That also means it may become training data for the systems it tests. This release is the starting line, not a permanent secret exam.
Future generations need automated ways to create difficult decks, hold cases back, delay disclosure, rotate prompts, and publish them after evaluation. The public suite remains valuable as a shared conformance target; hidden generations will measure generalization.
The browser ACID tests mattered because standards failures became visible and the community could make the tests better. Gloss should work the same way.
- Propose a difficult presentation behavior
- Report a checker gap
- Challenge evidence or a public claim
- Send a pull request
- Read CONTRIBUTING.md
gloss-v1/benchmark/deck/ Native challenge deck + 20 reference renders
gloss-v1/benchmark/prompts/ One exact brief + per-slide prompt variants
gloss-v1/benchmark/assets/ Approved source assets
gloss-v1/grader/ Simple checker + advanced grading protocol
site/ Static gloss.tools source
GLOSS_OPENSPEC.md Draft protocol for the bundled v1 suite
Code and benchmark materials are released under the Apache License 2.0, except third-party assets with their own notices.