paper-to-talk

paper-to-talk is a Codex / Claude Code skill for turning 1-2 academic papers into a clean 15-20 minute LaTeX Beamer journal-club talk.

It is designed for technical research talks where the deck needs to be concise, source-faithful, visually readable, and ready to compile.

Features

• Turns 1-2 academic papers into a 15-20 minute LaTeX Beamer journal-club deck.
• Enforces a clean slide flow: TL;DR, literature or method overview, context primer, method, results, grain-of-salt, takeaways, and backup.
• Builds estimator-zoo or literature-comparison slides to situate the paper among related methods.
• Extracts equations, figures, caveats, and headline numbers with source pointers.
• Uses a claim/evidence/caveat discipline so main slides avoid unsupported assertions.
• Analyzes talk transcripts, captions, Q&A, and author presentations to extract emphasis and discussion prompts.
• Keeps TL;DR and takeaways short, ideally one-line bullets.
• Includes Beamer layout rules, density budgets, and compile/render verification.

Install for Codex

Copy the skill directory into your Codex skills directory:

mkdir -p ~/.codex/skills
rm -rf ~/.codex/skills/paper-to-talk
cp -R skills/paper-to-talk ~/.codex/skills/paper-to-talk

Then invoke it in a prompt:

$paper-to-talk Prepare a 15-minute journal club presentation from this arXiv paper.

Install for Claude Code

Copy the same skill directory into the Claude Code skills location used by your setup:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
rm -rf ~/.claude/skills/paper-to-talk
cp -R skills/paper-to-talk ~/.claude/skills/paper-to-talk

Then invoke it by name or by asking for a paper-to-talk workflow.

Example Decks

This repo includes two example decks:

• examples/pairwise-ksz-gravity: a single-paper theory/method talk with a TL;DR, estimator zoo, method derivation, results, grain-of-salt, takeaways, and backup equations.
• examples/desi-act-ksz-stacking: a multi-paper observational talk that also uses author-talk transcript material for speaker emphasis and discussion prompts.

Verification Philosophy

The skill requires two checks before a deck is treated as done:

pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode -halt-on-error main.tex 2>&1 | grep -E "^!|Error|Output written|Overfull"

and a visual render pass of the output PDF. A compile that succeeds but produces dense, clipped, or unreadable slides is not considered complete.

License

See LICENSE.