academic-paper-to-slides

name: academic-paper-to-slides description: Builds Typst slide decks in the local lemonade theme from academic papers, preprints, and manuscript PDFs. Use when the user asks to draft, revise, or reorganize paper-reading, seminar, overview, or defense slides from paper content.

Academic Paper to Slides

Turn a paper into a presentation argument instead of mirroring the PDF page by page.

Use This Skill To

• distill one paper or a small paper set into slides
• extract claims, tables, equations, and exact numbers from a PDF while delegating generated figure creation to figure-generation by default
• preserve original paper figures only when requested by delegating extraction to figure_extractor
• adapt the same source into different academic contexts such as seminar, reading report, overview, or defense

Output Layout

Keep each paper's generated artifacts inside one paper workspace directory rather than scattering them across shared top-level folders.

Preferred layout:

• out/<paper>/<paper>.typ
• out/<paper>/notes/source.txt
• out/<paper>/notes/assets.json
• out/<paper>/notes/brief.json
• out/<paper>/notes/slides.json
• out/<paper>/notes/review.json
• out/<paper>/notes/asset-manifest.md
• out/<paper>/notes/brief.md
• out/<paper>/notes/slide-map.md
• out/<paper>/assets/...

Rules:

• Default to one workspace directory per paper under out/.
• If two source PDFs would map to the same <paper> name, disambiguate the workspace directory with a short parent-folder prefix such as out/<parent>-<paper>/.
• Keep briefs, slide maps, generated figures, crops, and extracted figures inside that paper workspace instead of shared top-level folders.
• Treat notes/*.json as canonical artifacts. Treat the Markdown notes as derived inspection files rendered from JSON.

Workflow

1. Determine the talk scenario, language, and register.
   • If the user names the occasion, follow it.
   • Otherwise default to a paper reading deck.
   • Read references/deck-structures.md for the deck arc. Use Systems Paper Reading / OSDI-SOSP Style by default unless the user names a different occasion such as a defense or progress report.
   • Read the language reference that matches the requested output:
     • references/chinese-academic-style.md
     • references/english-academic-style.md
2. Create the paper workspace.
   • Create out/<paper>/notes/ and out/<paper>/assets/ before any extraction, briefing, or drafting work.
   • Use scripts/paper_artifacts.py init-workspace <paper.pdf> --workspace out/<paper> to create assets.json, brief.json, slides.json, review.json, and the derived Markdown placeholders.
   • Keep all generated notes and assets in that workspace namespace.
3. Plan the artifacts before writing Typst.
   • Read references/planning-artifacts.md.
   • Complete the JSON artifacts and derived notes before drafting slides.
   • Run source extraction, choose visual source policy, and finish the visual plan before writing notes/slides.json.
   • Default to generated figures for every deck. Use figure-generation for generated visuals; use figure_extractor only when the user requests extracted or hybrid paper visuals.
4. Draft with the local presentation system.
   • Read workspace instructions first if the repo contains AGENTS.md.
   • Read references/lemonade-theme.md before drafting or revising slides in this repo.
   • Read references/archetypes.md for composition choice and split-slide decisions.
   • Reuse the local lemonade.typ macros, layouts, and deck conventions instead of inventing a parallel system.
   • Keep Typst generation thin and deterministic. Make content decisions in notes/slides.json, not ad hoc during emission.
   • Use scripts/paper_artifacts.py emit-deck --workspace out/<paper> by default. Reserve render_mode: "escape" for unusual layouts that still stay source-grounded.
5. Validate as a deck.
   • Run scripts/paper_artifacts.py validate-artifacts --workspace out/<paper> when the workspace has JSON artifacts.
   • Read references/visual-qa.md as the pass/fail rubric.
   • Read references/figure-prep.md when a selected registry asset needs reproducible cleanup.
   • Run scripts/validate_deck.sh <deck.typ> to compile the deck to a validation PDF.

Reference Map

• references/deck-structures.md: default arc selection, pacing, and scenario-specific structure
• references/planning-artifacts.md: artifact checklist, asset and brief rules, slide-map fields, evidence planning, and escape-mode planning
• references/english-academic-style.md / references/chinese-academic-style.md: sentence, title, and phrasing guidance
• references/archetypes.md: composition choice and readability-driven split decisions
• references/lemonade-theme.md: Typst, Lemonade, and image-helper usage
• references/figure-prep.md: reproducible crop cleanup for selected assets
• references/visual-qa.md: rendered-slide acceptance rubric

Non-Negotiables

• Rebuild the paper as a presentation argument rather than a section-by-section retelling.
• Keep notes/*.json canonical and re-render the Markdown notes instead of treating the .md files as the source of truth.
• Run the visual planning pass before drafting. Generated figures are the default and should be delegated to figure-generation; extracted figures remain delegated to figure_extractor when explicitly selected.
• Keep a slide-level takeaway in JSON for every planned slide.
• Assign source-grounded evidence before drafting a slide.
• Do not rely on captions alone to carry the main takeaway.
• Keep figures readable at slide scale. Split dense slides or split evidence before shrinking text.
• Reuse theme image helpers before adding deck-local layout helpers.