A Small Quarto Skill for Better Research Talks

For years, the hallmark of a serious academic or technical presentation has been a latex Beamer deck. I always found the template rather 90s – take that as you will. Of course, serious researchers are peer pressured into not using Power Point. After all, if it is in \(\LaTeX\), it must be true…

Mercifully, the age of Beamer is over. Open source and flexible options like Quarto + RevealJS make it easier to include code, equations, and other techie stuff into browser-native slides (HTML). The problem is making them look good.

With this in mind, I made a small Quarto Talks skill for research and technical presentations. Give it a paper or other source material, point Codex, Claude Code or another compatible coding agent to the repository, and ask it to make a slide deck. The skill gives the agent a set of editorial and visual rules, plus a Quarto RevealJS template to work with.

The skill is small, open and opinionated.

Why Quarto and RevealJS?

Quarto is an open-source publishing system built around plain-text Markdown files. It handles citations, equations, figures, code and computational output, and can render the same basic source format into articles, books, websites and presentations.

For slides, Quarto works especially well with RevealJS, an open-source framework for HTML presentations that run in the browser. This combination is quite convenient for technical talks: the source (.qmd) is readable, works naturally with Git, handles code and mathematics well, and can be published directly on the web. Quarto’s RevealJS documentation is a good place to start if you have not tried it yet!

There is another practical advantage now that coding agents are seemingly everywhere. An agent can read the source of a Quarto deck, edit it, render it, inspect the result and revise it. No clicking through a graphical slide editor spending precious time obsessing over details.

What is a skill?

The grandly named agentic skill is basically just a Markdown (.md) file.

Usually the central file is called SKILL.md. It contains reusable instructions for a particular task, and more elaborate skills can also include scripts, references, examples, templates and other assets. Both Codex and Claude Code support reusable skills of this kind.

It is basically a structured reusable prompt. Many workflows depend on accumulated preferences, corrections and small pieces of judgment. A skill gives those instructions a permanent home, so the agent can reuse them each time.

I personally have a weakness for small, opinionated design packages. My R package easytable came from the same instinct. Namely, that outputs should look good with sensible defaults and minimal intervention. The Quarto Talks skill applies a similar idea to presentations. It defaults to my own design preferences (blue hues), but you can modify this to your own needs.

What the skill asks the agent to do

The repository combines a small Quarto RevealJS format with a workflow for turning source material into a talk. The skill asks the agent to find the intellectual spine before drafting, choose material that earns its place in the presentation, vary the rhythm of slides, and give figures, equations, quotations and code enough space to remain legible. It also asks the agent to render the deck and inspect the actual slides.

A .qmd file can compile perfectly and still produce a terrible presentation.

The main editorial rule is simple: when a slide becomes overloaded, delete before shrinking, decorating or complicating. The skill also sets a soft limit on deck length (approx. 23) and warns against invented citations, quotations, equations, results or figures. However, if you need more slides, just tell your agent!

An example of the output produced with the Quarto Talks skill.

Try it on a paper

The easiest route is to give Codex or Claude Code the repository link, attach a paper or point the agent towards your source material, and ask it to download and use the skill. In my experience, simply giving the repository link works well enough.

For example:

Use the Quarto Talks skill from:
https://github.com/alfredo-hs/quarto-talks

Read the attached paper and create a presentation from it.
The talk will last 30 minutes. 

You can also install the Quarto template directly:

quarto use template alfredo-hs/quarto-talks

The repository is open and easy to clone/fork. Use the template on its own, give the complete skill to an agent, fork it, rewrite the instructions, change the visual system, or just use whichever elements you like.

If it is in latex RevealJS, it must be true.