beamer

A workflow guide for creating and checking academic slide decks with Beamer, a LaTeX system for making presentations. It covers creating slides, compiling them into PDFs, reviewing content and layout, and refining the result.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create, compile, proofread, audit, validate, and visually inspect Beamer presentations, including reviewing TikZ diagrams and extracting figures from research-paper PDFs.
Why use it?
It provides an ordered process and checks for problems such as grammar errors, overflowing content, inconsistent formatting, and weak teaching structure.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/noi1r/beamer-skill/beamer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Noi1r/beamer-skill

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 1,506 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.01506
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00753
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00301
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00151

Measured 2d ago against content hash de90fe7cd4ac, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

beamer scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.cursor/rules/beamer.mdc · 121 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 121 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Beamer Slide Workflow

You are an expert Beamer LaTeX assistant. Follow these rules when creating, editing, reviewing, or compiling academic presentations.

Core Workflow

create → compile → review → polish → verify

Actions

Action Description
create [topic] Iterative lecture creation: material analysis → needs interview → structure plan → draft → quality loop
compile [file] 3-pass XeLaTeX + bibtex with post-compile diagnostics
review [file] Read-only proofreading (grammar, typos, overflow, consistency, academic quality)
audit [file] Visual layout audit (overflow, fonts, boxes, spacing)
pedagogy [file] Pedagogical review with 13 validation patterns
tikz [file] TikZ diagram review
excellence [file] Comprehensive multi-dimensional quality review
devils-advocate [file] Challenge slide design with 5-7 pedagogical questions
visual-check [file] PDF→image systematic visual review for overflow/layout issues
validate [file] Structural validation against constraints
extract-figures [pdf] Extract figures from paper PDFs for slides

Default Preamble

\documentclass[aspectratio=169,10pt]{beamer}
\usetheme{Madrid}
\usecolortheme{default}
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
\setbeamertemplate{footline}[frame number]

\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb,amsthm,booktabs,mathtools}
\usepackage{stmaryrd}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{arrows.meta,positioning,decorations.pathreplacing}

% Semantic colors (colorblind-safe)
\definecolor{positive}{HTML}{0173B2}
\definecolor{negative}{HTML}{DE8F05}
\definecolor{emphasis}{HTML}{029E73}
\definecolor{neutral}{gray}{0.55}
\definecolor{cbPurple}{HTML}{CC78BC}
\newcommand{\pos}[1]{\textcolor{positive}{#1}}
\newcommand{\con}[1]{\textcolor{negative}{#1}}
\newcommand{\HL}[1]{\textcolor{emphasis}{#1}}

Hard Rules (Non-Negotiable)

  1. No overlays — never \pause, \onslide, \only, \uncover. Use multiple slides + color emphasis.
  2. Max 2 colored boxes per slide.
  3. Motivation before formalism — "Why?" before "What?".
  4. Worked example within 2 slides of every definition.
  5. XeLaTeX only — never pdflatex.
  6. Beamer .tex is the single source of truth.
  7. Verify after every task — compile, check warnings, open PDF.
  8. Telegraphic style — keyword phrases, not full sentences. Each bullet ≤ 2 lines (~15 words).
  9. Every slide earns its place — must contain formula, diagram, table, theorem, or algorithm.
  10. Box-interior overflow guard — limit box content to one display equation OR 2-3 short bullets. Never \qquad inside boxes. Beamer suppresses overflow warnings inside blocks — always visually verify.
  11. Reference slide — second-to-last (before Thank You), \begin{thebibliography}{9} with \small.
  12. Color contrast ≥ 4.5:1 (WCAG AA). Never red+green binary contrasts. Use \pos{}, \con{}, \HL{}. Limit palette to 3-5 colors.
  13. Never use \tiny for user-facing content.
  14. Backup slides — 3-5 after Thank You with \appendix. Not counted in timing.
  15. Columns: \begin{columns}[T], two columns 0.48+0.48, figure+text 0.50+0.45. Never nest.

Read the full file on GitHub · 121 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 121 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A de90fe7cd4ac

Subscribe to this mod's changes

beamer is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository Noi1r/beamer-skill (341 stars, last pushed 21d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,506 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.