LaTeX Beamer Slide Builder

Problem

When turning papers, research notes, or outlines into slides, the hard part is often not the content, but layout, Chinese compilation, math/table/citation rendering, and editable PPTX output. latex-slide-builder treats LaTeX Beamer as the canonical slide source: it first maintains a clean .tex file and compiles it to PDF, exporting PPTX only when explicitly requested instead of starting from PowerPoint-specific visual fragments.

Workflow and limits

The workflow clarifies inputs and outputs, extracts text from a paper PDF with extract_paper_text.py when needed, forms a slide plan, drafts an academic 8–15 slide outline, generates a Beamer deck from academic_beamer_template.tex, and compiles with build_deck.py using XeLaTeX by default. It then checks compiler errors, fixes the .tex, and recompiles until the PDF is produced or the failure is clearly external. Chinese-first rules require ctexbeamer or Beamer plus ctex, keep the source as UTF-8, default to 16:9, and avoid pdfLaTeX for Chinese decks.

This fits academic reports, thesis defenses, lectures, and paper-reading slides, especially with mixed Chinese-English text, math, tables, or citations. PPTX is a companion export that can use the bundled template or a user-provided .pptx template as a Pandoc --reference-doc, but the Beamer PDF is usually the highest-fidelity output. Delivery should be checked for correct Chinese rendering, figures, tables, math, citations, slide count, and successful PDF compilation; visual parity with PPTX should not be assumed without inspection.