Presentation Making
Turn source material into a presentation built for an audience and a live explanation. Preserve technical accuracy while making the argument easier to follow than the source alone.
Load detailed guidance selectively
- Read deck-workflow.md before creating a new deck or substantially restructuring an existing deck.
- Read visual-design-review.md when selecting a visual system, designing layouts, or reviewing rendered slides.
- For a narrow text edit to a few existing slides, use the core rules below without loading both references.
Core rules
- Establish the audience, purpose, venue, allotted time, source material, and required output format before building.
- Read the full source relevant to the talk. Do not invent claims, examples, results, equations, references, or quotations.
- Plan the narrative and the job of each slide before editing the deck.
- Give each slide one primary point or teaching move.
- Use an existing approved deck or template as the visual source when one is available. Preserve its typography, margins, colors, and page furniture.
- Keep one visual system. Do not mix themes or recreate a supplied style from memory.
- Prefer diagrams, equations, figures, plots, and concrete evidence over dense prose. Do not add decorative images.
- Keep visible text short enough to read at presentation distance. Put details needed for delivery, but not simultaneous reading, in speaker notes.
- Preserve notation exactly. Render mathematics with true superscripts, subscripts, primes, limits, and conditioning notation.
- Use progressive builds only when each step helps the spoken explanation.
- Keep the source editable. Retain PowerPoint objects or compilable Beamer source rather than flattening the deck into images.
- Render and inspect every slide before delivery. Fix clipping, overflow, accidental overlap, tiny text, inconsistent spacing, distorted images, placeholder residue, and unreadable citations.
Workflow
- Resolve the source and constraints.
- Write a slide plan with the point, evidence, layout, and build behavior for every slide.
- Select a visual source and map planned slides to suitable layout families.
- Build the editable deck with the appropriate presentation tools.
- Render the complete deck and inspect every physical slide or overlay.
- Correct defects, rerender, and repeat until the review passes.
- Report the final deck path and any unresolved content questions.
When the user provides feedback, preserve the exact concern and convert repeated feedback into a short reusable rule for later decks.
