Summary

If you provide a reference doc that contains no slides, the resulting pptx displays as containing no slides, regardless of the input markdown. The slides' xml files are present in the output archive, but PowerPoint is not aware of them.

This is because modifySldIdLst searches for an existing sldIdLst element in presentation.xml to replace it, but if you delete all slides from the reference doc the sldIdLst element is also removed.

Pandoc version 2.14.2, macOS

To Reproduce

• Open a copy of pandoc's default reference pptx in PowerPoint
• Delete all slides (but not the layouts)
• Use the resulting doc as reference doc in a call to pandoc, e.g. pandoc --reference-doc reference-empty.pptx -o slides.pptx input.md