deck-beamer-academic

Beamer Academic Deck

Produces compile-ready LaTeX Beamer source for academic talks and lectures. This skill is the render step — it governs how content lands on slides (the medium). Three upstream concerns are handled elsewhere and assumed (or done inline, lightly, when missing):

• Narrative & pacing (the one takeaway, the arc, time budget, what to cut) → research-talk-planner.
• Content reasoning (how to actually explain a method or idea — the pressure it responds to, intuition before formalism, math as justification, the fundamental tradeoff) → professor-mentor-technical-teaching.

These compose as layers, they do not compete: professor-mentor-technical-teaching decides what the right explanation is; this skill compresses that explanation to the medium. The professor layer is the source for the substance of teaching-oriented slides (lecture content, the seminar idea/method movement); it is not a deck structure — never expand its eight-stage arc onto eight dense slides. Pull its reasoning into a slide's Message and Notes, then cut to one signal per frame.

If the user has a talk plan, ingest it. If not, do a fast version of the planning questions below before writing any LaTeX.

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Genres this skill covers

Genre	Length	Emphasis	Theme default
Conference talk	12–20 min	One contribution, clean and fast	metropolis or clean default
Seminar / colloquium	45–60 min	Build understanding, room for detail	metropolis
Invited / job talk	45–60 min	Research program, taste, depth	metropolis, custom title
Thesis defense	30–45 min	Mastery of a body of work	institutional theme if required
Lecture	50–90 min	Pedagogy, worked examples, repetition	high-contrast, large fonts

Lectures differ from talks: they prioritize learning over persuasion. Expect section recaps, worked examples, "check your understanding" slides, and tolerable redundancy. Talks prioritize a single memorable message and ruthless cutting.

How much to lean on the content-reasoning layer, by genre:

Genre	Use of professor-mentor-technical-teaching
Lecture	Heavily. The lecture is teaching — reason about every concept in professor-mode (intuition first, worked examples, critical analysis), then slice onto slides.
Seminar / colloquium	On the idea/method movement — name the pressure the method responds to, build intuition before the equations, surface the fundamental tradeoff.
Invited / job talk	Lightly, on the method slides only; the deck's job is taste and program, not re-derivation.
Conference talk	One compressed insight per the talk arc; the full critical-analysis arc lives in Q&A prep, not on slides.
Thesis defense	On the core method(s) the committee will probe; keep depth in backup slides.

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Workflow

1. Gather inputs (fast)

• Source material: paper, section, results, or a research-talk-planner plan.
• Genre + exact time slot.
• Audience (subfield specialists / broad ML / mixed / students).
• Theme/branding constraints (institutional template? color? logo?).
• Math density (talk-light vs. proof-heavy seminar).

If there's no plan and the talk is non-trivial, state the one takeaway in a sentence and a rough time budget before proceeding. Don't silently invent an arc — surface it for confirmation.

2. Build the slide-spec

Produce the per-slide spec from references/slide-spec-and-design.md (one block per frame). Pacing: ~1 slide/minute as default; fewer slides with more time beats more slides rushed. Use claim-titles. Mark each visual's provenance (reuse paper figure / new TikZ / table / chart).

For any method / idea / concept slide — and across a whole lecture — reason about the content with professor-mentor-technical-teaching before compressing it:

• Name the pressure the method responds to; that becomes the slide's Message, not "Method overview".
• Put intuition before formalism: an intuition slide (or build) precedes the equation slide; introduce notation before the symbols appear.
• Earn every equation — it should answer "what is optimized / bounded / approximated / traded off". If it does no argumentative work on the slide, move it to Notes or a backup slide.
• Carry the fundamental tradeoff and one failure mode into the spec (often a single slide near the close, or Q&A prep) — don't present a method as universally good.
• The full reasoning lives in Notes (what you'll say); the frame shows only the one signal.

Confirm the spec with the user before emitting LaTeX.

3. Emit compile-ready .tex

Render the approved spec to Beamer. Requirements:

• A complete, self-contained document that compiles with pdflatex/lualatex out of the box (use assets/preamble.tex as the base).
• One frame per spec block; the spec title becomes the frametitle.
• \pause / overlay specs (\onslide<>, \only<>) for any Build steps.
• Speaker Notes become \note{...} (with \setbeameroption{show notes} commented out for easy toggling), never on-slide text.
• Figures via \includegraphics with a clear \graphicspath; placeholder boxes (\fbox/tikz) where a file isn't supplied yet, clearly marked % TODO: replace placeholder.
• Tables sized for projection (\small/\footnotesize, booktabs).
• Math built incrementally where the spec calls for it.

4. Hand off

Tell the user: the compile command, which figure files to drop in, and where to toggle speaker notes. Offer a backup-slides appendix section for anticipated Q&A.

Ship scripts/compile.sh alongside the .tex so the deck builds in one step with no remembered flags:

./scripts/compile.sh talk.tex        # latexmk if present, else two pdflatex passes
./scripts/compile.sh -c talk.tex     # compile, then clean aux files
ENGINE=lualatex ./scripts/compile.sh talk.tex

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Beamer specifics that matter

• Theme: default to metropolis (clean, modern, low-chrome). Fall back to stock default + a sober color theme if metropolis/pgfplots aren't available; note the package dependency.
• Fonts: large enough to project. Avoid the default tiny block text; metropolis handles this. For lectures bump base size.
• Overlays: prefer \onslide/\only over piling everything with \pause when ordering matters. Overlays should reveal logic (baseline → ours), not animate for flair.
• Figures: never \includegraphics a paper figure at paper density — note in the spec when a figure must be simplified/re-exported for the slide.
• Sections: \section{} + a \tableofcontents[currentsection] recap is good for seminars/lectures, overkill for a 15-min conference talk.
• Title slide: title, author, affiliation, venue+date. Job/invited talks may add a one-line research-vision subtitle.
• Closing: a take-home claim slide (the one takeaway restated), then leave a "Questions?" / title slide up for Q&A — not a bullet summary.
• Reproducibility: the deck must compile with no manual edits beyond dropping in figure files.

See assets/preamble.tex for a ready preamble (theme, fonts, math, booktabs, tikz, notes toggle, claim-title styling).

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Anti-patterns to refuse

• Pasting whole paragraphs / paper abstract onto a frame.
• One frame trying to carry the whole method.
• Label-titles (Results, Method) instead of claim-titles.
• Animations/transitions with no explanatory purpose.
• Importing every paper figure unchanged at paper resolution.
• Expanding the professor-mentor-technical-teaching eight-stage arc into eight dense slides — that arc is for prose; on slides it must be compressed to one signal per frame, with the depth in Notes/backup.

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Output

1. The confirmed slide-spec (markdown).
2. A single compile-ready .tex (plus the preamble), with placeholders clearly marked.
3. Compile + figure-drop + notes-toggle instructions.