Presentation Slides

Use this skill for slide decks, especially LaTeX Beamer presentations with mathematical or research content.

Goal

Produce slides that are:

• mathematically connected,
• visually clean,
• readable without overflow,
• consistent in notation and language,
• shaped to this user's presentation preferences by default.

What This Skill Does

• creates new Beamer talks,
• rewrites existing decks,
• improves mathematical exposition,
• repairs layout and overflow,
• merges or splits frames when needed,
• turns paper material into presentation form.

What This Skill Does Not Do

• it does not leave mathematical gaps unexplained,
• it does not keep ugly overflow just because the PDF compiles,
• it does not answer user confusion with meta-commentary boxes when the slide itself should be rewritten,
• it does not casually rename notation across slides.

Default Workflow

1. Read the source first.
2. Identify the deck's mathematical story.
3. Check whether current slides are too dense, disconnected, or notation-inconsistent.
4. Rewrite slide content before polishing layout.
5. Compile after substantial edits.
6. Treat overflow and heavy shrink as errors to fix.

Core Rules

1. Read Before Editing

• Prefer local paper .tex sources if they exist.
• Otherwise use local notes/library entries.
• Read the paper PDF if the notes are not enough for strict slides.

2. Mathematical Chain

• New formulas must be motivated by previous slides.
• The deck should read as a chain, not as a bag of facts.
• Theorem conditions should appear in formulas when possible, not only in prose.
• If the user asks for stronger theory, rebuild the slide from the source paper rather than paraphrasing loosely.

3. Language

• Default slide prose is Russian.
• Keep method names, code, commands, file names, and only standard technical terms in English.
• Remove decorative or unnecessary English phrases from slide bodies.

4. Notation

• Keep notation stable across the whole deck.
• Reuse notation already accepted by the user.
• Do not rename core objects casually.
• If the user rejects a notation choice once, preserve the preferred one later.

5. Reacting To User Feedback

• If the user says something is unclear, rewrite the slide itself.
• Do not solve that by adding a side box that says, in effect, “here is why this is here”, unless that mathematical object genuinely belongs as part of the slide's logic.
• The answer should become obvious from the revised slide content itself.
• If the user asks to combine slides, combine them.
• If the user asks to remove a slide, remove it unless there is a clear dependency that must first be rebuilt elsewhere.

6. Layout Policy

• Prefer framed blocks, balanced columns, and visual hierarchy over plain fact lists.
• Keep one main idea per frame.
• If content does not fit, split the frame before shrinking aggressively.
• Use proof frames or backup frames for dense derivations.

7. Overflow Policy

• Overfull \hbox is an error.
• Overfull \vbox is an error.
• Frame text is shrunk is usually an error.
• A clean log does not mean the deck is clean. A tcolorbox inside columns that runs past the bottom of a frame is silently cut by the page edge: no warning, latexmk exits 0. Never report a deck as done without running scripts/check_overflow.py on the built PDF and getting all pages fit. It also catches tables running off the right edge.
• Fix in this order:
  1. cut redundant text
  2. drop the least load-bearing box
  3. shrink the figure
  4. rebalance columns
  5. split the frame
• Do not rely on heavy shrink as the default solution.
• Capacity on 16:9 at 10pt (frame body ~205 pt): a column holds a figure or three short boxes, not both; a full-width figure leaves room for at most two boxes under it; six boxes on one frame is a guaranteed cut.

8. Lab Style — The Default

Every deck for this lab uses the BRAIn Lab house style unless the user explicitly asks for something else. Authoritative compact reference: examples/lab-style-mini.tex, with examples/lab-style-notes.md for the mandatory traits.

• Palette comes from two sources: the poster template ~/brainlab/ops/communications/posters/lora-duo/brainposter.sty and, decisive for slides, the lab deck ~/brainlab/large-models/optimizer-state-compression/huawei-optimizers/notes/talks/Talk3_Efficient_Pretraining_30min.pptx: plum #854C65 (full-bleed background of title / section / closing frames, and heading colour on content frames), cream #FAF8F1 (content background, and text on plum), amber #FFD183 (headings on plum), amberink #A9741A (amber readable on cream), ink #1F1B18, red #B0453F (problems), muted #8C8078.
• Never a white background — cream #FAF8F1. Plain white looks flat and does not sit with the rest of the palette. Figures go in white cards on the cream ground, which then read as cards.
• The deck's rhythm is the alternation of full-bleed plum frames and cream content frames. That alternation is what makes it look designed. Use the plumframe environment for the plum ones.
• \usetheme{metropolis}, aspectratio=169, serif lmodern — not monospace.
• Frame title: plum text on cream plus a thin plum rule at text width. Turn the theme progress bar off (progressbar=none): it spans the whole page, looks coarser and breaks overflow checking.
• Title slide: typography only — no logo, no author line, no $ run --... lines. Large amber title, thin amber rule, cream subtitle, date bottom-left and BRAIn Lab bottom-right.
• Box convention: mathbox white card (equations, tables), ideabox faint plum (ideas, results), thmbox amber (theorems, stable facts, surprising findings), probbox faint red (problems). All four carry fontupper=\small; without it three boxes never fit a column.
• \fcap{...} for figure captions must contain \par inside the group, otherwise \scriptsize does not control the leading and the caption renders oversized.

9. Figures — Find Before You Draw

• A figure from the paper always beats a hand-rolled schematic. Before generating anything in matplotlib, pull the original: check ~/brainlab/*/*/literature/_attachments/<arxiv-id>/ first (the paper-ingest skill already extracted figures for some papers), then curl -sL https://arxiv.org/e-print/<id> and untar. grep -rhoE 'includegraphics\[[^]]*\]\{[^}]*\}' *.tex shows which figures the paper itself actually uses.
• Crop only with pdfcrop --margins 3. Do not set a CropBox by hand (pymupdf and pdfTeX disagree about CropBox vs MediaBox and the figure lands offset). To take one panel of a multi-panel figure, narrow the MediaBox first, then pdfcrop.
• Do not squeeze a portrait figure into a 16:9 frame whole: cut out the wide fragment that carries the idea.
• Own figures, when no source figure exists: matplotlib, white background, serif fonts, mathtext.fontset=cm, palette colours above — use #5E8797 for lines, because #9DE1FC itself is unreadable on white.

10. Terminal Style — Only On Request

• Use it only when the user asks for terminal style or терминальный стиль. It is a slide theme, not the lab's identity: anything representing the lab uses the palette above.
• Authoritative reference: examples/terminal-style-mini.tex, traits in examples/terminal-style-notes.md.
• Interpret it as: \usetheme{metropolis}, aspectratio=169, dark background (#0D1117), dark card/title background (#161B22), green accent (#00FF88), blue secondary (#58A6FF), orange theorem accent (#FF7B54), red problem accent (#FF6B6B), monospace bold titles, section dividers in the same visual language, compact tcolorbox blocks, clean plain final slide.
• Title slide there is rich: top // tag line, thin rules, title, blue subtitle, coloured author and affiliation lines, one or two $ run --... / $ git clone ... lines, optional QR row.
• Figures on the dark canvas must sit in a white figcard panel, otherwise they look broken.

Preferred Output Shape For Theory Decks

1. motivation
2. precise setup
3. derivation or approximation step
4. theorem or guarantee
5. algorithmic consequence
6. empirical or practical note

Reference Files

Load only what is needed:

• references/beamer-workflow.md - compile-and-fix workflow for Beamer
• references/user-presentation-preferences.md - detailed user-specific rules for mathematical slides, feedback handling, notation, and layout
• examples/lab-style-mini.tex - default style anchor: BRAIn Lab house style
• examples/lab-style-notes.md - mandatory visual traits of the lab style, figure sourcing, frame capacity
• scripts/check_overflow.py - detects frames whose content is silently cut by the page edge; run it before calling a deck done
• examples/terminal-style-mini.tex - style anchor for the dark terminal theme, only when asked
• examples/terminal-style-notes.md - mandatory visual traits of terminal style in short form