beamer-deck

Beamer Deck Skill

Generate academic Beamer presentations with original themes, rhetoric-driven structure, and multi-agent review. Internalises Scott Cunningham's rhetoric framework and implements an adversarial review workflow.

Purpose

Create polished, zero-warning Beamer decks for academic contexts: seminars, conference talks, teaching lectures, and working decks for coauthors. Every deck gets a custom theme, assertion-driven titles, and parallel review by rhetoric and graphics sub-agents.

NOT for project status updates — use project-deck for those.

When to Use

• Academic seminar presentations
• Conference talks (15–45 min)
• Teaching lectures (undergraduate or PhD)
• Working decks for coauthors or supervisors
• Any presentation that needs rhetoric discipline and visual quality

---

Critical Rules

1. Build artifacts go to out/, PDF stays in the source directory. Use the latex pre-flight to install the fail-closed canonical .latexmkrc; never hand-write a partial config or copy block. Use latex for compilation and engine resolution.
2. Python: Always use uv run python. Never bare python, python3, pip, or pip3.
3. Fix ALL warnings. Overfull hbox, underfull hbox, overfull vbox, underfull vbox — no matter how small. Parse the .log file. Recompile until clean.
4. Titles are assertions, not labels. "Distance increases abortion rates" — not "Results". Every frame title states a claim.
5. One idea per slide. Not a guideline. A law. If a slide has two ideas, split it.
6. Use the unified template. Always use \usepackage[<institution>]{user-beamer} from templates/beamer/. Options: preset-a, preset-b, preset-c, preset-d, plain. Never use default Beamer themes (Warsaw, Madrid, etc.) as-is, and never create one-off preambles. See [templates/beamer/README.md] for available custom commands and how to add institutions.
7. Code-first figures. Generate figures via R or Python scripts before inserting. Never use placeholder images. Always save the script alongside the figures — never generate a figure without preserving the code that created it.
8. If a .bib file is used, validate it. Cross-reference all \cite{} keys against the bibliography file. See bib-validate for the full protocol.
9. Never define parameterized TikZ styles inside a frame. # inside a Beamer frame body is consumed by the frame parser before TikZ sees it, producing Illegal parameter number errors that cascade and resist all downstream fixes. Define ALL \tikzset{...} and .style={..., #1} entries in the preamble; use them inside frames. See ../shared/tikz-rules.md Rule 11.