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Desktop GUI (PySide6)

AutoPaperToPPT ships an optional desktop interface built on PySide6. It wraps the existing CLI flow (search → results table → export) in a window so users who don't want a terminal can still drive the project.

Install

The GUI is gated behind a separate extra to avoid forcing PySide6 (~80 MB) on CLI / MCP users who don't need it:

pip install autopapertoppt[gui]

If you also want the rich-tier enrichment path:

pip install autopapertoppt[gui,intelligence,mcp]

Launch

Three equivalent entry points:

autopapertoppt-gui                    # PyPI console script
autopapertoppt gui                    # CLI subcommand
py -m autopapertoppt gui              # module entry, useful while developing

The Windows release .exe also accepts autopapertoppt.exe gui — the bundle includes PySide6 and the source plugins so no extra install is needed.

Tabs

The window has four tabs. The first two are functional in this release; the other two are placeholders that will land in a follow-up.

Search

The core search → export flow.

  • Query — keyword string (UTF-8; CJK works).
  • Sources — checkbox grid; pre-selected to the same default set as the CLI (arxiv, semantic_scholar, openalex, pubmed, dblp, crossref, openaire). Opt-in plugins (scholar, ieee) are unchecked until you tick them and have the corresponding env var set in Settings.
  • Slide language — picks the language for any .pptx exported from this run. Defaults to English.
  • Max results per source — 1 … 200 (same as the CLI --max).
  • Year from / Year to — leave at — to disable.
  • Top-tier venues only — mirrors the CLI's default; un-tick to keep every result.

Press Search. The query runs on a worker thread so the UI stays responsive; the status bar reports progress and the results table populates when the run finishes.

Press Export…, pick an output directory, and the standard .pptx + .xlsx + .bib triple lands there.

Settings

API keys, contact email, cookies file, and UI language are stored locally via Qt's QSettings (Windows registry, macOS plist, Linux ini). Saving a value also exports the matching environment variable into the current process, so the source plugins pick it up without a shell restart.

Fields:

UI label Env var written
Anthropic API key ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
Semantic Scholar API key AUTOPAPERTOPPT_S2_API_KEY
NCBI / PubMed API key AUTOPAPERTOPPT_NCBI_API_KEY
IEEE Xplore API key AUTOPAPERTOPPT_IEEE_API_KEY
Springer Nature API key AUTOPAPERTOPPT_SPRINGER_API_KEY
Crossref Plus token AUTOPAPERTOPPT_CROSSREF_PLUS_TOKEN
Contact email AUTOPAPERTOPPT_CONTACT_EMAIL
PDF cookies file AUTOPAPERTOPPT_PDF_COOKIES_FILE

Empty values clear the corresponding env var. Restart the app to refresh fetcher singletons that cached the env value at construction time.

Enrich (coming soon)

Per-paper PDF + LLM enrichment will land here. For now: set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in Settings, run a search, then export — the CLI side auto-enriches each paper that has a downloadable PDF.

Deck (coming soon)

PPTX inspector / editor. The MCP server already exposes pptx_inspect / pptx_update_slide / pptx_reorder_slides / pptx_delete_slide / pptx_add_slide; this tab will wire them behind a Qt list view + form panel.

i18n

The UI ships in all 14 languages that the slide-deck exporter supports: English, 繁體中文, 简体中文, 日本語, Español, Français, Deutsch, 한국어, Português, Русский, Italiano, Tiếng Việt, हिन्दी, Bahasa Indonesia.

Pick the language under Settings → Interface language (the dropdown shows each language in its own script). Restart the app to apply.

First-run behaviour: if no language is saved yet, the app reads the OS locale via QLocale().name() and maps it to the closest supported code (e.g. zh_TW → zh-tw, es_ES → es, zh-Hant-TW → zh-tw). Unsupported locales fall back to English.

Two separate i18n tables live in the repo:

  • autopapertoppt/gui/i18n.py — UI labels (this page).
  • autopapertoppt/exporters/i18n.py — slide-deck output strings.

They're kept in lockstep by tests/gui/test_i18n.py::test_supported _languages_match_deck_table. Adding a key is a single-file change; the per-key, per-language coverage test catches any missing entry at PR time.

Responsive layout & HiDPI

  • The window has a minimum size of 900×600 (still fits a 720p laptop) and a default of 1280×800.
  • Each tab page lives inside a QScrollArea with widgetResizable=True, so the form widgets stretch horizontally with the window width and reveal a vertical scrollbar when the window shrinks below the form's natural height.
  • HiDPI scaling is enabled at boot via QT_ENABLE_HIGHDPI_SCALING=1 and QT_SCALE_FACTOR_ROUNDING_POLICY=PassThrough. Both are set before QApplication is constructed, which is the only safe time to pin them.
  • The default font is bumped to point size 10 (Qt's platform default is 8 on some Windows machines) so CJK glyphs stay readable on dense screens. The font family list includes Windows-shipped CJK / Devanagari fallbacks (Microsoft JhengHei UI, Yu Gothic UI, Malgun Gothic, Nirmala UI) so a missing glyph in the primary font cascades cleanly rather than rendering a tofu box.

Threading model

Every backend call runs off the main thread:

  • AsyncWorker wraps a coroutine factory and calls asyncio.run inside QRunnable.run — used for run_search, single-paper fetches, anything that touches httpx.AsyncClient.
  • BlockingWorker wraps a plain function — used for export_collection, which renders the .pptx via python-pptx.

Both emit finished(object) / failed(object) signals on completion; the receiving slot lives on the main thread so it can update widgets safely.

Testing the GUI

The test suite under tests/gui/ uses pytest-qt (installed by the [dev] extra). It mocks the backend so no live HTTP is made:

pip install -e ".[dev]"
py -m pytest tests/gui/

Tests fall into three families: i18n coverage, Qt model behaviour, and page-level wiring (a search button click populates the table, the export button stays disabled until results arrive, settings round-trip through QSettings).

Known limitations

  • The Settings page does not validate keys against the live API — validation would leak the key into HTTP logs and slow down save. An invalid key surfaces later as a ConfigError / 401 from the relevant source plugin.
  • The window does not yet remember its size / position between runs. Add QMainWindow.saveGeometry / restoreGeometry if you want that.