I wanted to give a little bit of background on the motivation behind this post. For a while, I’ve been making academic posters using PowerPoint, Keynote, or Adobe Illustrator, and while it’s possible to get a high-quality result from these tools, I’ve always been frustrated by the amount of manual effort required to do so: having to calculate positions of elements by hand, manually laying out content, manually propagating style changes over the iterative process of poster design…
For writing papers (and even homework assignments), I had switched to LaTeX a long time ago, but for posters, I will still using these frustrating GUI-based tools. The main reason was the lack of a modern-looking poster theme: there were existing LaTeX poster templates and themes out there, but most of them felt 20 years old.
A couple weeks ago, I had to design a number of posters for a conference, and I finally decided to take the leap and force myself to use LaTeX to build a poster. During the process, I ended up designing a poster theme that I liked, and I’ve open-sourced the resulting theme, hoping that it’ll help make LaTeX and beamerposter slightly more accessible to people who want a modern and stylish looking poster without spending a lot of time on reading the beamerposter manual and working on design and aesthetics.
Yes, I use LaTeX or ConTeXt for most of my writings, apart from notes in plain text.
No, I just don’t think TeX is a great way for posters. Probably because I am a control freak in making posters, I really want my prominent content/figures exactly where they are supposed to be and how large I want them to be on a poster. Sometimes I ferociously shorten my text to just be able to get the next section a little higher, so the section title does not fall off the main poster viewing area. So, yes, I still use pages.
I guess the difference is whether I am more focused on explaining things, which I use LaTeX, or I am more focused on laying out text blocks and figures, which GUI-based tools excel.
I often want something in between. Like I want to click and draw arrows and figures but have that turned into LaTeX code so I can still style around that.
@anishathalye did you run into Beamer by any chance? It was the hot thing a decade ago I think. There is an extension for it for posters. I see that you have :)
Hi Lobsters, author here.
I wanted to give a little bit of background on the motivation behind this post. For a while, I’ve been making academic posters using PowerPoint, Keynote, or Adobe Illustrator, and while it’s possible to get a high-quality result from these tools, I’ve always been frustrated by the amount of manual effort required to do so: having to calculate positions of elements by hand, manually laying out content, manually propagating style changes over the iterative process of poster design…
For writing papers (and even homework assignments), I had switched to LaTeX a long time ago, but for posters, I will still using these frustrating GUI-based tools. The main reason was the lack of a modern-looking poster theme: there were existing LaTeX poster templates and themes out there, but most of them felt 20 years old.
A couple weeks ago, I had to design a number of posters for a conference, and I finally decided to take the leap and force myself to use LaTeX to build a poster. During the process, I ended up designing a poster theme that I liked, and I’ve open-sourced the resulting theme, hoping that it’ll help make LaTeX and beamerposter slightly more accessible to people who want a modern and stylish looking poster without spending a lot of time on reading the beamerposter manual and working on design and aesthetics.
Yes, I use LaTeX or ConTeXt for most of my writings, apart from notes in plain text.
No, I just don’t think TeX is a great way for posters. Probably because I am a control freak in making posters, I really want my prominent content/figures exactly where they are supposed to be and how large I want them to be on a poster. Sometimes I ferociously shorten my text to just be able to get the next section a little higher, so the section title does not fall off the main poster viewing area. So, yes, I still use pages.
I guess the difference is whether I am more focused on explaining things, which I use LaTeX, or I am more focused on laying out text blocks and figures, which GUI-based tools excel.
I often want something in between. Like I want to click and draw arrows and figures but have that turned into LaTeX code so I can still style around that.
@anishathalye did you run into Beamer by any chance? It was the hot thing a decade ago I think. There is an extension for it for posters.I see that you have :)Yeah, beamer / beamerposter is awesome! I just didn’t like the way the default themes / existing third-party themes looked, so I made my own.