Beamer in One Chapter: A Minimum Sufficient Specification for Presentation Pedagogy in LaTeX Vol 3

The LaTeX beamer class is the only mature LaTeXnative facility for typesetting slide decks at the visual and mathematical quality of a beamer-authored conference paper. For the Document Engineering Vol 3 textbook (audience 14+, LaTeX as second markup language after Markdown), beamer must be taught, because the alternative is to leave learners unable to carry equation-heavy report content into the slide medium without quality loss. The pedagogical question is not whether to include beamer but how much of it to include. The Tantau user guide is 250+ pages; the LaTeX beamer ecosystem includes themes, color systems, inner/outer theme programmability, overlay arithmetic, multimedia embedding, frame-mode finite-state machines, and a poster sub-language; absorbing the whole surface inside a 14+ textbook would re-introduce exactly the syntax-mass failure mode the H4.1 thinking framework was built to escape. This paper derives a minimum-sufficient specification for a single Vol 3 chapter on beamer, anchored in (a) the H4.1 thinking framework, (b) the slide-pedagogy literature on cognitive-load-aware slide design (Mayer multimedia learning, Sweller cognitive load update, Reynolds Presentation Zen, Tufte's PowerPoint critique, Alley's assertion-evidence model, Kosslyn et al.'s psychological-flaw taxonomy, Doumont's signal-noise communication framework), and (c) a documentation analysis of comparable beamer chapters in Kottwitz's introductory LaTeX texts, the Mittelbach et al. LaTeX Companion 3e, the Overleaf living tutorial, and the Wikibooks open content. The specification consists of eight chapter sections plus one full sample frame, each section carrying a target word count, learning objective, key example, and explicit exclusion list. The survival criterion is operational: a feature is in only if its omission would prevent a learner from producing a defensible thirtyslide academic presentation that compiles, renders Vietnamese diacritics correctly via XeLaTeX + polyglossia, exports a four-up handout, and reuses math content from a parallel LaTeX report without manual reformatting. The decision affected — Vol 3 final chapter structure — is settled by the specification: one chapter, eight sections, roughly 6,500 Vietnamese words, one capstone activity, with a companion handout-template artefact deferred to tools/. Out of scope: empirical cohort validation (program-wide directive), beamerposter, multi-presentation institutional theme development.