Writing Good Decks

None of this is enforced. It's what tends to work.

Content

One idea per slide. If the slide needs a comma in its title, it's probably
two slides. ## is cheap.

Write the title as a claim, not a label. "Diffusion is slower than you
think" tells the audience what to take away; "Diffusion" tells them the topic
they already knew was coming.

Let auto-fit be a warning, not a feature. Tachyonn shrinks the font until
the content fits, so a slide never clips. When you notice a slide rendering
noticeably smaller than its neighbours, that's the tool telling you the slide is
overfull — split it rather than accepting 60% type nobody can read from row
fifteen.

Prefer a figure to a bullet list, and a bullet list to a paragraph. Full
sentences on a slide compete with you for the audience's attention, and the
slide wins.

Pacing

Reveal to control attention, not to create suspense. A click that says now
look here earns its place. A click that shows the second half of a sentence
does not.

Say the click out loud. If you can't say why the audience shouldn't have
seen that item thirty seconds ago, don't hide it.

Keep the layout still. This is now the default — a hidden
reveal keeps its space, so nothing moves or
resizes as you click. Reach for reveal: push only when the growing list is
the point.

Put the reminders in speaker notes, not on the
slide. The date, the caveat, the name you always forget — those are for you.

Structure

Use # sections generously. They cost one slide and they buy you
Shift+arrow jumps, a table of contents (T), and a readable overview (O).
In a lecture where someone asks about something from twenty minutes ago, that's
the difference between one keystroke and twenty.

Label the slides you'll want to jump to. :: id on the heading, then
:[id] links to it from anywhere — including from a slide you added later.

Mark backup material toc: false. Appendix slides stay in the deck and out
of the way.

Keeping a course maintainable

Put shared things in a tac.config. The theme, the footer, the contact
macro. Every deck in the folder inherits them, and changing the course's look
is one edit instead of fifteen.

Make repeated slides macros. The contact slide, the notices slide, the
"where we are" slide. See
Composition & Scripting.

Define notation once with texMacro:. Forty hand-typed \mathbb{R}s is
forty chances to write \mathbf{R} by mistake.

Run tachyonn unused-images occasionally. img/ is shared across sibling
decks, so it accumulates. The command knows that and won't tell you to delete a
figure another lecture still uses.

Before you present

Rehearse in presenter mode. The time: key on the two or three slides you
know you overrun turns the timer into useful feedback instead of decoration.

Set up the displays once. The arrangement is saved by monitor name, so a
recurring lecture in the same room only needs configuring the first time.

Export a PDF as insurance. tachyonn export lecture.tac. Laptops fail;
someone else's machine can open a PDF.