DeckAssembler: Professional Slide Orchestrator

About the Project

DeckAssembler was architected to bridge the compatibility gap in collaborative presentations. I developed a specialized 'Image-Bridge' pipeline that bypasses the layout corruption typical of standard file merging by rasterizing source slides into high-resolution assets. To handle the intensive CPU demands of rendering and LibreOffice-based conversions, I migrated the system from a monolithic structure to a Producer-Consumer architecture. This uses a Dramatiq worker pool and Redis to manage heavy processing tasks out-of-band, providing users with real-time progress updates. The final output is an intelligently compressed PPTX file, engineered to balance visual clarity with professional file-size constraints.

Engineering Challenges

01Asynchronous Resource Management

Rasterizing large slide decks at 300 DPI caused significant memory spikes and request timeouts in standard synchronous environments.

Solution: Implemented a background task queue using Dramatiq and Redis. I engineered a streaming upload system that writes directly to a shared volume, allowing the API to hand off processing to a worker pool that manages memory pressure through dynamic downsampling.

02Multi-Format Fidelity Preservation

Students often submit work with complex fonts and proprietary layouts that break when merged directly into a master PowerPoint file.

Solution: Created an optimized conversion pipeline that uses headless LibreOffice to standardize all inputs to PDF before using PyMuPDF for lightning-fast rasterization. This ensures the final output is a 1:1 visual match of the original submission.