5 ms·

Create your next conference poster with LaTeX

99 points by VelNZ 14y ago

awblocker 14y ago
Good suggestion. I've also found the baposter template very useful ( http://www.brian-amberg.de/uni/poster/ http://www.brian-amberg.de/uni/poster/ ).
- VelNZ 14y ago
  I've already got another 3 poster templates (including one from the page you linked) about 90% ready to be put up on the site, I just need to find the time to finalize them and put them up. Give me a week or two and check back on the site for more! Unfortunately it's just me working on the website and I'm also a PhD student so that doesn't leave much time to put up new templates. It doesn't help that the vast majority of them have very poor commenting and odd spacing which needs to be brought in line with the commenting style I use throughout the website.
  - susi22 14y ago
    I've seen your website before. I like it. But: Have you ever considered moving all this (in addition) to github? With every template in a subdirectory. Could make collaborating and bringing other folks in easier. Btw, thanks for not making everything with a colored background in the poster. I always feel like that's a huge waste of ink
    - VelNZ 14y ago
      Thanks! I've had a bit of feedback regarding opening up the site and allowing community editing/submission automatically. While I definitely see the value in this approach, I personally believe that the top-down approach is better with regard to quality, consistency and ease of use. I don't want to start a debate on the topic, but lets just say I am happy with the way things are and prefer to keep everything under my control, at least at the moment.
      - pyre 14y ago
        Just to note that opening it up on Github doesn't necessarily entail a loss of control.
      - meemo 14y ago
        I think you'd find that there are other people who share your values regarding quality. Eventually, you might be able to share the work of maintaining the site with these people and the site will grow more quickly. (And maybe you'll enjoy seeing some new templates appear.) Otherwise, (I think) what will happen is that you'll get tired of maintaining the site and updates will stop. Anyway, I'm glad your site exists and I appreciate your work.
spindritf 14y ago
What a great website -- CVs, presentations, snippets to copy... even books. What's the catch? Restrictive licensing? Because this seems too good to be true and free. If this is all just a way to upsell people, I'm in awe. EDIT: And there's an RSS channel with new additions.
- VelNZ 14y ago
  No catch, I started the website as a free resource of LaTeX templates because one didn't exist and I intend to keep template downloads free. All current templates are licensed under creative commons. I do have a few plans for how I can capitalize on the website but templates will always be available for free download and I despise ad-ridden websites so that won't be happening either. If you have any ideas send me an email! It is getting more and more popular and I am making a little bit of money from it, but it is primarily for the masses. If you like the work please consider donating through Flattr, or better yet, take out an advertisement ;)
  - sillysaurus 14y ago
    This editor is incredible. How did you make it? Can I see the un-minified source code somewhere? I want to learn how to make this.
    - niggler 14y ago
      From the about page, they are separate people: https://spandex.io/about https://spandex.io/about http://www.latextemplates.com/about http://www.latextemplates.com/about
      - sillysaurus 14y ago
        Nevertheless, I want to make this editor. How?
        niggler 14y ago
        They are using the ace editor: http://ace.ajax.org/ http://ace.ajax.org/ There's some bootstrap and other jazz, and obviously a server-side component to perform the LaTeX rendering
ot 14y ago
The template is just a theme for beamerposter [1], which is a very nice extension to LaTeX Beamer to make posters. I've used beamerposter and I'm very happy with it, it is easily customizable (just create a beamertheme<yourname>.sty) so I suggest to make your own theme, maybe with the colors of your institution (for example, I went for a bluish flat theme: http://www.di.unipi.it/~ottavian/files/wavelet_trie_poster.pdf http://www.di.unipi.it/~ottavian/files/wavelet_trie_poster.p...) [1] http://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~dreuw/latexbeamerposter.php http://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~dreuw/latexbeamerpo...
k4st 14y ago
I have found that a combination of Scribus, GraphViz, and OmniGraffle are my favourite tools for making conference posters. Scribus has a few quirks, but once you learn them it's pretty easy to be very productive.
tfe 14y ago
I don't understand why you would use LaTeX to lay out a poster. It just doesn't seem like the right tool for that kind of job to me. I concede that I may be missing something though, since everyone else seems to like it.
- Genmutant 14y ago
  It's really good if you want to include lots of "sciency stuff" like formulas, source code and maybe graphs. Also Bibliographies are easy in LaTeX. Plus it's free, and you don't have to learn a new tool.
- adimitrov 14y ago
  It's pretty easy to just re-do your poster with an entirely different content and not have to worry much about layout. For somebody who may be uncomfortable with (expensive) GUIs for poster layout, which would force you to think about every little aspect of design and layout, a LaTeX template does a good job of just getting things done.
- meemo 14y ago
  If you've already written a paper in LaTeX, it's easy to copy and paste the equations, diagrams, bibliographies, etc. And they'll look good (especially equations, and also diagrams if you've used something like TikZ.)
- primitur 14y ago
  Why use vim+makefiles to build a big C/C++ project when you can just use VisualStudioC++ to do it? LaTeX is a great way to make quality documents, really appealing, with very little investment beyond an afternoon or two of study - and, with sites like this, even less of an investment in LaTeX is required before something useful can be produced. The beauty of this site is that it presents very tangible aesthetics to a design process that is not usually associated with such results, beyond the cognescenti. LaTeX can easily make appealing, beautiful documents, in the time it takes MS Word to boot its buttonstrips ..
renke1 14y ago
Oh, kind of motivates me to create a poster for a recent software project we did in university. I always wondered how hard it is to create a good poster (especially in LaTeX).
smiddereens 14y ago
I put down LaTeX when I finished grad school.
primitur 14y ago
Just wanted to say a big thank you for this site .. its a really wonderful resource, and has solved a question I've had in my mind for a year or two, with regards to how to handle my personal documentation needs: either a) continue to use an ancient license of MS Word, and OpenOffice/whatever to evade future investments, or b) automate my docs someway, somehow, while still producing aesthetically appealing literature. So, I've been a big fan of your site, and it has gotten me back into LaTeX after a long hiatus of disinterest, and I'm now producing everything with a plain old text editor - and wow, it really rocks! Thanks!
- VelNZ 14y ago
  Thanks for the high praise! I hope that by the end of the year I've got 100 templates up for an even wider diversity of document needs. Who needs Word anymore?
  - primitur 14y ago
    Honestly, I'm sniffing, but not seeing any reason to go that path. Automated Aesthetics as you offer, indeed, replaces the need .. ;)
sGrabber 14y ago
Great Repository
sGrabber 14y ago
Good repository

99 points by VelNZ 14y ago

Good suggestion. I've also found the baposter template very useful ( http://www.brian-amberg.de/uni/poster/ http://www.brian-amberg.de/uni/poster/ ).

VelNZ 14y ago
I've already got another 3 poster templates (including one from the page you linked) about 90% ready to be put up on the site, I just need to find the time to finalize them and put them up. Give me a week or two and check back on the site for more! Unfortunately it's just me working on the website and I'm also a PhD student so that doesn't leave much time to put up new templates. It doesn't help that the vast majority of them have very poor commenting and odd spacing which needs to be brought in line with the commenting style I use throughout the website.
- susi22 14y ago
  I've seen your website before. I like it. But: Have you ever considered moving all this (in addition) to github? With every template in a subdirectory. Could make collaborating and bringing other folks in easier. Btw, thanks for not making everything with a colored background in the poster. I always feel like that's a huge waste of ink
  - VelNZ 14y ago
    Thanks! I've had a bit of feedback regarding opening up the site and allowing community editing/submission automatically. While I definitely see the value in this approach, I personally believe that the top-down approach is better with regard to quality, consistency and ease of use. I don't want to start a debate on the topic, but lets just say I am happy with the way things are and prefer to keep everything under my control, at least at the moment.
    - pyre 14y ago
      Just to note that opening it up on Github doesn't necessarily entail a loss of control.
    - meemo 14y ago
      I think you'd find that there are other people who share your values regarding quality. Eventually, you might be able to share the work of maintaining the site with these people and the site will grow more quickly. (And maybe you'll enjoy seeing some new templates appear.) Otherwise, (I think) what will happen is that you'll get tired of maintaining the site and updates will stop. Anyway, I'm glad your site exists and I appreciate your work.

spindritf 14y ago

What a great website -- CVs, presentations, snippets to copy... even books. What's the catch? Restrictive licensing? Because this seems too good to be true and free. If this is all just a way to upsell people, I'm in awe. EDIT: And there's an RSS channel with new additions.

VelNZ 14y ago
No catch, I started the website as a free resource of LaTeX templates because one didn't exist and I intend to keep template downloads free. All current templates are licensed under creative commons. I do have a few plans for how I can capitalize on the website but templates will always be available for free download and I despise ad-ridden websites so that won't be happening either. If you have any ideas send me an email! It is getting more and more popular and I am making a little bit of money from it, but it is primarily for the masses. If you like the work please consider donating through Flattr, or better yet, take out an advertisement ;)
- sillysaurus 14y ago
  This editor is incredible. How did you make it? Can I see the un-minified source code somewhere? I want to learn how to make this.
  - niggler 14y ago
    From the about page, they are separate people: https://spandex.io/about https://spandex.io/about http://www.latextemplates.com/about http://www.latextemplates.com/about
    - sillysaurus 14y ago
      Nevertheless, I want to make this editor. How?
      - niggler 14y ago
        They are using the ace editor: http://ace.ajax.org/ http://ace.ajax.org/ There's some bootstrap and other jazz, and obviously a server-side component to perform the LaTeX rendering

ot 14y ago

The template is just a theme for beamerposter [1], which is a very nice extension to LaTeX Beamer to make posters. I've used beamerposter and I'm very happy with it, it is easily customizable (just create a beamertheme<yourname>.sty) so I suggest to make your own theme, maybe with the colors of your institution (for example, I went for a bluish flat theme: http://www.di.unipi.it/~ottavian/files/wavelet_trie_poster.pdf http://www.di.unipi.it/~ottavian/files/wavelet_trie_poster.p...) [1] http://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~dreuw/latexbeamerposter.php http://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~dreuw/latexbeamerpo...

k4st 14y ago

I have found that a combination of Scribus, GraphViz, and OmniGraffle are my favourite tools for making conference posters. Scribus has a few quirks, but once you learn them it's pretty easy to be very productive.

tfe 14y ago

I don't understand why you would use LaTeX to lay out a poster. It just doesn't seem like the right tool for that kind of job to me. I concede that I may be missing something though, since everyone else seems to like it.

Genmutant 14y ago
It's really good if you want to include lots of "sciency stuff" like formulas, source code and maybe graphs. Also Bibliographies are easy in LaTeX. Plus it's free, and you don't have to learn a new tool.
adimitrov 14y ago
It's pretty easy to just re-do your poster with an entirely different content and not have to worry much about layout. For somebody who may be uncomfortable with (expensive) GUIs for poster layout, which would force you to think about every little aspect of design and layout, a LaTeX template does a good job of just getting things done.
meemo 14y ago
If you've already written a paper in LaTeX, it's easy to copy and paste the equations, diagrams, bibliographies, etc. And they'll look good (especially equations, and also diagrams if you've used something like TikZ.)
primitur 14y ago
Why use vim+makefiles to build a big C/C++ project when you can just use VisualStudioC++ to do it? LaTeX is a great way to make quality documents, really appealing, with very little investment beyond an afternoon or two of study - and, with sites like this, even less of an investment in LaTeX is required before something useful can be produced. The beauty of this site is that it presents very tangible aesthetics to a design process that is not usually associated with such results, beyond the cognescenti. LaTeX can easily make appealing, beautiful documents, in the time it takes MS Word to boot its buttonstrips ..

renke1 14y ago

Oh, kind of motivates me to create a poster for a recent software project we did in university. I always wondered how hard it is to create a good poster (especially in LaTeX).

smiddereens 14y ago

I put down LaTeX when I finished grad school.

primitur 14y ago

Just wanted to say a big thank you for this site .. its a really wonderful resource, and has solved a question I've had in my mind for a year or two, with regards to how to handle my personal documentation needs: either a) continue to use an ancient license of MS Word, and OpenOffice/whatever to evade future investments, or b) automate my docs someway, somehow, while still producing aesthetically appealing literature. So, I've been a big fan of your site, and it has gotten me back into LaTeX after a long hiatus of disinterest, and I'm now producing everything with a plain old text editor - and wow, it really rocks! Thanks!

VelNZ 14y ago
Thanks for the high praise! I hope that by the end of the year I've got 100 templates up for an even wider diversity of document needs. Who needs Word anymore?
- primitur 14y ago
  Honestly, I'm sniffing, but not seeing any reason to go that path. Automated Aesthetics as you offer, indeed, replaces the need .. ;)

sGrabber 14y ago

Great Repository

sGrabber 14y ago

Good repository