About Scholium#

Scholium (Greek: σχόλιον) — An explanatory note or commentary appended to a text, typically to clarify or expand on a point the main text does not fully address.

Scholium is a command-line tool that converts markdown slides with embedded narration into professional narrated instructional videos. It is designed for educators who want to produce lecture recordings, flipped-classroom content, and course libraries without leaving their text editor.

Project Philosophy#

Simple tool, not a framework. Scholium does one thing well: converts markdown + narration into video. It integrates with your existing workflow rather than replacing it. There is no web UI to learn, no proprietary format to adopt, and no cloud dependency unless you choose a cloud TTS provider.

Text-first. Everything is plain text — markdown slides and YAML configuration — so your content is:

  • Version controllable with Git alongside your course materials

  • Searchable and editable in any text editor

  • Reproducible across systems and collaborators

  • Easy to maintain semester after semester

Pandoc-native. Scholium uses standard Pandoc/Beamer slide syntax, so the same source file renders as a PDF presentation with LaTeX/Beamer as well as a narrated video. You are not locked in.

Narration as documentation. The :::notes::: block is both the speaker notes in your slide deck and the narration script for the video. Writing them once produces both outputs. Metadata lines (:: like this) serve as in-file author notes, references, and TODOs that are never spoken aloud — keeping context close to the content it describes.

Performance#

Generation time scales with the TTS provider and available hardware:

Hardware

Time per 10-minute lecture

NVIDIA GPU

5–10 minutes

Apple Silicon

10–15 minutes

Modern CPU

30–60 minutes

First run: models download automatically (~500 MB–1.5 GB) and are cached for future use.

Name#

The word scholium (plural: scholia) entered English from the Greek σχόλιον, meaning leisure, study, or commentary. Ancient scholars added scholia as margin notes to classical texts — the original form of annotated teaching materials. Scholium does the same for the modern classroom: your narration notes become the commentary that brings the slides to life.