This is more a (long) comment than an answer – in particular it does not address your TeXnical questions.
I have written a couple of theses and supervised many more. From that experience, I just cannot recommend this approach.
The basic idea is, I guess, to save some time by reusing content of your thesis also in the presentation slides. However, slides are a visual medium with an accompanying "audio track" (that is, you). As such, they are very different from a thesis text and require very different content. A couple of examples to underline this:
Structure
Even though the structure of a thesis (and the accompanying presentation) is somewhat canonical, you will often present arguments in the slides in a slightly different order, just because it works better for an oral presentation or is more interesting for the audience.
Itemize lists
- In the thesis text (and maybe the handout) they should be comprehensible without further explanations. In most cases, they will be complete sentences or even more.
- On the slides, items should be just anchor points for the information transmitted via the "audio track". They should be short, never break into the second line, and typically are not complete sentences. If they nevertheless do break into the second line, you have to insert manual line breaks to make them look even. You would never do this in the thesis text.
Figures and tables
In my experience, the only elements that sometimes can be reused. However, even with figures and tables there are some points to consider:
- The thesis is written on A4 or letter paper, for which it is favorable to have portrait-oriented elements. (This is particularly the case when using
tufte-book
.)
- Slides are landscape-oriented, which means that figures and tables often have to be redesigned.
- In many cases, a figure/table has to be simplified for the slides.
- For complex figures/tables you will want to add piecewise appearance or highlighting.
Bottom line
The bottom line is: Either there is not much reuse of content (no time saving) or one of both, the slides or the text, will be weak!
While preparing their seminar, many of the students I supervise start with a set of slides that basically mimics their thesis. After several iterations of improving their slides, the outcome is usually very different.