beamer — academic LaTeX Beamer presentations skill

Turn papers and notes into clean, colour-blind-safe Beamer talks — with a content-strategy outline, modern themes, and a compile-and-look feedback loop.

What it does

• Two modes — balanced (default: guided, flexible, suggests rather than enforces) and strict (opinionated hard rules on slide counts, words per slide, and structure). See beamer/references/modes.md.
• Modern themes and profiles — Metropolis (default, XeLaTeX), the first-party Academic Navy profile for a polished navy/teal research-talk look, a Moloch dark-mode drop-in, and a zero-setup Madrid fallback (pdfLaTeX). Catalog in beamer/references/theme-catalog.md.
• Content-strategy-driven outlines — works from audience → narrative spine → per-slide type (motivation, method, result, takeaway) instead of dumping the paper onto slides. See beamer/references/content-strategy.md.
• TikZ / pgfplots figures — native, vector, reproducible diagrams and plots that match the deck palette. See beamer/references/tikz-pgfplots.md.
• Compile + visual-check loop — compile.sh builds the PDF via latexmk; visual_check.sh rasterises pages so the model can spot overflow, clipping, and contrast issues, then iterate.
• Figure extraction from PDFs — extract_figures.py pulls images out of a source paper PDF (via poppler) so you can reuse real figures.
• Multi-platform — ships rule files for Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, GitHub Copilot, and Codex / other AGENTS.md-aware tools.

Prerequisites

• A LaTeX distribution — TeX Live, MacTeX, or TinyTeX — providing latexmk and XeLaTeX (or LuaLaTeX). A Unicode engine is needed for the Metropolis/Moloch font handling (the skill defaults to XeLaTeX); Madrid works with plain pdfLaTeX if you have neither.
• poppler for visual-check and figure extraction (pdftoppm, pdfimages, pdftocairo):

  brew install poppler        # macOS
  sudo apt install poppler-utils   # Debian/Ubuntu

• Run the theme installer once to fetch the modern themes:

  beamer/scripts/install_metropolis.sh

  On TinyTeX this uses tlmgr and installs into your home directory — no sudo required.

Install

Pick the file for your editor / agent. Each is a thin pointer that loads the full skill in beamer/.

• Claude Code

  mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
  rm -rf ~/.claude/skills/beamer        # safe to re-run / upgrade
  cp -r beamer ~/.claude/skills/beamer

  It is auto-discovered as the beamer skill — just ask Claude to make slides.
• Cursor — copy .cursor/rules/beamer.mdc into your project's .cursor/rules/.
• Cline — copy .clinerules/beamer.md into your project's .clinerules/.
• GitHub Copilot — copy .github/copilot-instructions.md into your repo's .github/.
• Codex / other — copy AGENTS.md to your project root (or merge it into an existing one).

Usage

Natural-language prompts, once the skill is installed:

• create a 15-minute talk from paper.pdf
• compile example/slides.tex
• review my slides in strict mode
• turn these notes into slides for a general audience
• extract the figures from paper.pdf and put them on result slides
• rebuild the deck in dark mode with the Moloch theme
• match the EcoSta-style deck with the Academic Navy profile

The agent will draft an outline first, confirm the spine, then generate .tex, compile, visually check the rendered pages, and fix issues before handing back the PDF.

Example

A ready-to-read bootstrap talk lives in example/:

• example/slides.tex — a complete deck using the canonical Metropolis preamble, the semantic colour macros, a pgfplots chart, a TikZ diagram, and a manual thebibliography.
• example/slides.pdf — the committed, compiled output, so you can see the result without a LaTeX install.

Build it yourself with:

beamer/scripts/compile.sh example/slides.tex

Repo layout

beamer/                         the skill itself
  SKILL.md                      entry point and workflow
  references/                   modes, content-strategy, theme-catalog,
                                style-profiles, templates, snippets, design-guidelines,
                                tikz-pgfplots, compilation, review-checklist
  scripts/                      compile.sh, visual_check.sh,
                                extract_figures.py, install_metropolis.sh
  assets/templates/             metropolis.tex, academic-navy.tex, madrid.tex,
                                clean.tex, references.bib
  assets/themes/                gallery/ (9 de-branded community themes),
                                THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md, README.md
example/                        slides.tex + committed slides.pdf
.cursor/rules/beamer.mdc        Cursor integration
.clinerules/beamer.md           Cline integration
.github/copilot-instructions.md GitHub Copilot integration
AGENTS.md                       Codex / other agents integration

Modes

• balanced (default) — guided and flexible: proposes structure, word budgets, and figures, but adapts to your material and lets you override.
• strict — opinionated and enforced: no overlays, telegraphic style, density caps, a fixed spine, a references slide, and a numeric quality score (≥ 90 to ship) over a fixed review checklist.

Full definitions: beamer/references/modes.md.

Credits

• Content-strategy ideas are adapted from awesome-notebookLM-prompts (MIT, by Serena) — the audience-first outlining approach.
• Built on open Beamer themes, installed via tlmgr or built into Beamer (not redistributed here, except public-domain SimplePlus if vendored):
  • Metropolis — LPPL + CC-BY-SA
  • Moloch — CC-BY-SA (Metropolis-compatible, dark-mode capable)
  • Focus — GPL-3
  • SimplePlus — Unlicense (public domain)
  • Wildcat — GPLv3
  • Leiden / TU Delft — institutional templates (check their terms before reuse)
• The bundled themes gallery (beamer/assets/themes/gallery/) adapts 9 Overleaf community templates, de-branded (logos/named content removed). They are redistributed under their own licenses — most CC BY 4.0, bruno is CC0, and trigon is an external CTAN theme (not bundled). Per-theme license and attribution is in beamer/assets/themes/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

The skill's own code is MIT; bundled third-party themes keep their own licenses (listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md), and the tlmgr/built-in themes above are referenced, not redistributed.

License

MIT © Xianyang Zhang.