Creating posters in LaTeX
Contents
Creating posters in LaTeX¶
Some poster packages and templates can be found here. The aim for me as of time of writing was to create an A0 poster for my master’s thesis.
The skeletal poster structure templates will be available here
Table of Contents¶
Overall structure¶
I opted to use the baposter template, which relies on a grid based format for designing posters. We define a set number of header boxes, their location and relation to one another, and the content within. The following sections detail this process with examples.
The \headerbox command¶
The headerbox is a box on the poster which has a header. We can define an arbitrary box with
\headerbox{TITLE OF THE BOX}{name=reference_name, column=0, row=0}{
CONTENT
}
Other options to help format these boxes include
span=[int]for the column spanabove=ref,below=refanchor the box above and below to another header box
### Figures
In general, float types do not tend to behave very well in baposter, and instead we use the center type; e.g., for two images
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.25\linewidth]{IMAGE1}
\includegraphics[width=0.25\linewidth]{IMAGE2}
\captionof{figure}{CAPTION}
\end{center}
Formatting options¶
Here are some meta / general formatting options I’ve encountered using baposter.
### Background image Setting a background image can be done in the preamble
\background{
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]
\draw (current page.north west)+(-2em,2em) node[anchor=north west]
{\hspace*{-2cm}\includegraphics[height=1.1\paperheight, trim=0 0 0 0]{BACKGROUD_IMAGE}};
\end{tikzpicture}
}
Most of this command is fairly generic; the \hspace*{-2cm} is an arbitrary magic value to help shift and relocate the image a little, and should be tampered with to obtain the desired result.
Making the content boxes transparent¶
I wanted my background image to ever so slightly show through into the header box content, so I found this solution to set a transparency value
\makeatletter % make boxes semi transparent
\renewcommand{\baposter@box@drawbackground@plain}[2]{\tikzset{box colors/.style={fill=#1,fill opacity=0.95}} \fill[box colors] \baposterBoxGetShape;}
\makeatother
where opacity controls the transparency.
Including the bibliography¶
References in baposter behave the same as in any other LaTeX template, however a little extra boilerplate is required to make them visually appealing; I personally use
\renewcommand{\section}[2]{\vskip 0.05em}
to get rid of the “References” title, and then
\bibliographystyle{ieeetr}
\bibliography{BIB IMAGE}
to include the references.