paper-to-talk

paper-to-talk

Overview

Build a presentation deck from source papers with three non-negotiable disciplines:

1. Source fidelity — every equation, figure, and attribution traces to a specific page/equation/figure in the source PDF. Nothing recalled from memory.
2. Clean slide design — the default slide has open space, one visual or one idea, sparse text, and no more information than can be spoken comfortably.
3. Argument structure — every assertion holds a (claim, evidence pointer, caveat) triple. Strong evidence → main slide. Weak or parametrization-sensitive → grain-of-salt slide.

Each slide has one thesis sentence. If you can't write that sentence, the slide isn't ready.

Design defaults

Optimize for a 15-minute spoken path plus discussion. Prefer fewer, cleaner slides over comprehensive coverage.

• Target 10-12 spoken frames plus title and backup for a 15-minute talk; use 12-14 only for a full 20 minutes.
• Use one primary figure, equation, or table per slide. If a slide has two visuals, remove most text.
• Keep most slides to 3 bullets or fewer; TL;DR and take-away slides may use 4 bullets.
• Keep bullets to one line when possible. If a bullet wraps twice, compress or split the idea.
• Put detailed derivations, reference tables, robustness catalogs, and source pointers in backup unless they are essential to the story.
• Leave a visible blank region on every slide. Do not fill all quadrants just because space exists.
• Prefer \small or normal size for spoken content. Use \scriptsize only for citations, compact tables, or backup.
• Use source lines as muted footers, not paragraphs.

When a slide feels dense, fix it in this order:

1. Delete secondary claims.
2. Move caveats to the grain-of-salt slide or backup.
3. Replace prose with a labeled figure or 2-3 word callout.
4. Split only if both halves are essential to the spoken path.

Workflow

1. Source extraction

For each paper:

• Fetch the arXiv abstract/PDF or use the user-provided PDF.
• Read the saved PDF page ranges. Hit in order: title page → abstract → intro → methods/theory → results → appendices.
• Capture verbatim: first 3 authors + et al, equation numbers, figure numbers, exact symbols, footnote caveats.
• Distinguish speaker (presenter at the talk) from paper author (first author of the PDF). They are not the same.