Paper Page Figure

Paper Page Figure

Render the first page of a paper as a PNG for slides. A full paper page is portrait (~1:1.27), which is exactly the right shape for a columns: 62/38 right column — prefer the full page over cropping to the title/abstract region unless the slide needs the abstract text to be readable.

Steps

1. Download the PDF (for arXiv, the bare /pdf/<id> URL, no .pdf suffix needed):

   curl -sL "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.00861" -o paper.pdf
   

2. Convert page 1 to PNG. Density 200 is plenty for a slide column; -trim removes the page margins and a small white border re-adds clean padding; PNG8: keeps black-text-on-white pages tiny (~80KB) with no visible loss:

   magick -density 200 'paper.pdf[0]' -trim +repage \
     -bordercolor white -border 24 -resize x1400 -strip \
     PNG8:paper-firstpage.png
   

3. Copy the reviewed result into the assets directory the deck uses (teach/course/assets/ for course lectures, the talk's own assets/ otherwise) with a descriptive name, e.g. hhh-paper-2021.png.

4. Reference it as a right column with no caption (the page is self-captioning):

   <!-- columns: 62/38 -->
   ## Slide title
   
   Body text... [@citekey]
   
   |||
   
   ![](assets/hhh-paper-2021.png)
   

Notes

• Work in the session scratchpad, not the repo; only cp the final PNG in.
• If the page carries a vertical arXiv stamp on the left edge, leave it — it reads as authenticity. -trim already keeps it because it is ink.
• For a landscape variant (title + authors + abstract only), crop before resizing: add -crop x62%+0+0 -trim after the first -trim +repage. Only use this when the abstract must be readable on the slide.
• Screenshots of web pages (announcements, tweets) are a different workflow: headless Chrome --screenshot, see the lecture decks' recent assets for examples.