Posters

Scientific posters present technical information and are intended for congress or presentations with colleagues. Since $L a T e X$ is the most natural choice to typeset scientific documents, one should be able to create posters with it. This article explains how to create posters with latex

Introduction

The two main options when it comes to writing scientific posters are tikzposter and beamerposter. Both offer simple commands to customize the poster and support large paper formats. Below, you can see a side-to-side comparison of the output generated by both packages (tikzposter on the left and beamerposter on the right).

Tikzposter

Tikzposter is a document class that merges the projects fancytikzposter and tikzposter and it's used to generate scientific posters in PDF format. It accomplishes this by means the TikZ package that allows a very flexible layout.

Open an example of the tikzposter class in ShareLaTeX

The preamble and the title

The preamble in a tikzposter class has the standard syntax.

\documentclass[24pt, a0paper, portrait]{tikzposter}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\title{Tikz Poster Example}
\author{ShareLaTeX Team}
\date{\today}
\institute{ShareLaTeX Institute}

\usetheme{Board}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\end{document}

The first command, \documentclass[...]{tikzposter} declares that this document is a tikzposter. The additional parameters inside the brackets set the font size, the paper size and the orientation; respectively. The available font sizes are: 12pt, 14pt, 17pt, 20pt and 24pt. The possible paper sizes are: a0paper, a1paper and a2paper. There are some additional options, see the further reading section for a link to the documentation.

The commands title, author, date and institute are used to set the author information, they are self-descriptive.

The command \usetheme{Board} sets the current theme, i.e. changes the colours and the decoration around the text boxes. See the reference guide for screenshots of the available themes.

The command \maketitle prints the title on top of the poster.

Open an example of the tikzposter class in ShareLaTeX

The body

The body of the poster is created by means of text blocks. Multi-column placement can be enabled and the width can be explicitly controlled for each column, this provides a lot of flexibility to customize the look of the final output.

\documentclass[25pt, a0paper, portrait]{tikzposter}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\title{Tikz Poster Example}
\author{ShareLaTeX Team}
\date{\today}
\institute{ShareLaTeX Institute}

\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{comment}

\usetheme{Board}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\block{~}
{
    \blindtext
}

\begin{columns}
    \column{0.4}
    \block{More text}{Text and more text}
    
    \column{0.6}
    \block{Something else}{Here, \blindtext \vspace{4cm}}
    \note[
        targetoffsetx=-9cm, 
        targetoffsety=-6.5cm, 
        width=0.5\linewidth
        ]
        {e-mail \texttt{sharelatex@sharelatex.com}}
\end{columns}

\begin{columns}
    \column{0.5}
    \block{A figure}
    {
        \begin{tikzfigure}
            \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{images/lion-logo.png}
        \end{tikzfigure}
    }
    \column{0.5}
    \block{Description of the figure}{\blindtext}
\end{columns}

\end{document}

In tikzposter the text is organized in blocks, each block is created by the command \block{}{} which takes two parameters, each one inside a pair of braces. The first one is the title of the block and the second one is the actual text to be printed inside the block.

The environment columns enables multi-column text, the command \column{} starts a new column and takes as parameter the relative width of the column, 1 means the whole text area, 0.5 means half the text area and so on.

The command \note[]{} is used to add additional notes that are rendered overlapping the text block. Inside the brackets you can set some additional parameters to control the placement of the note, inside the braces the text of the note must be typed.

The standard $L a T e X$ commands to insert figures don't work in tikzposter, the environment tikzfigure must be used instead.

Open an example of the tikzposter class in ShareLaTeX

Beamerposter

The package beamerposter enhances the capabilities of the standard beamer class, making it possible to create scientific posters with the same syntax of a beamer presentation.

By now there are not may themes for this package, and it is slightly less flexible than tikzpopster, but if you are familiar with beamer, using beamerposter don't require learning new commands.

Note: In this article a special beamerposter theme will be used. The theme "Sharelatex" is based on the theme "Dreuw" created by Philippe Dreuw and Thomas Deselaers, but it was modified to make easier to insert the logo and print the e-mail address at the bottom of the poster. Those are hard-coded in the original themes.

Even though this article explains how to typeset a poster in $L a T e X$ , the easiest way is to use a template as start point. We provide several in the ShareLaTeX templates page

Open an example of the beamerposter package in ShareLaTeX

The preamble

The preamble of a beamerposter is basically that of a beamer presentation, except for an additional command.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{times}
\usepackage{amsmath,amsthm, amssymb, latexsym}
\boldmath

\usetheme{Sharelatex}
\usepackage[orientation=portrait,size=a0,scale=1.4,debug]{beamerposter}

\title[Beamer Poster]{ShareLaTeX example of the beamerposter class}
\author[sharelatexteam@sharelate.com]{ShareLaTeX Team}
\institute[Sharelatex University]{The ShareLaTeX institute, Learn faculty}
\date{\today}

\logo{\includegraphics[height=7.5cm]{SharelatexLogo}}

The first command in this file is \documentclass{beamer}, which declares that this is a beamer presentation. The theme "Sharelatex" is set by \usetheme{Sharelatex}. There are some beamer themes on the web, most of them can be found in the web page of the beamerposter authors.

The command

\usepackage[orientation=portrait,size=a0,scale=1.4,debug]{beamerposter}

Imports the beamerposter package with some special parameters: the orientation is set to portrait, the poster size is set to a0 and the fonts are scaled to 1.4. The poster sizes available are a0, a1, a2, a3 and a4, but the dimensions can be arbitrarily set with the options width=x,height=y.

The rest of the commands set the standard information for the poster: title, author, institute, date and logo. The command \logo{} won't work in most of the themes, and has to be set by hand in the theme's .sty file. Hopefully this will change in the future.

Open an example of the beamerposter package in ShareLaTeX

The body

Since the document class is beamer, to create the poster all the contents must be typed inside a frame environment.

\documentclass{beamer}
  \usepackage[english]{babel}
  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
  \usepackage{times}
  \usepackage{amsmath,amsthm, amssymb, latexsym}
  \boldmath
  
  \usetheme{Sharelatex}
  \usepackage[orientation=portrait,size=a0,scale=1.4]{beamerposter}


  \title[Beamer Poster]{ShareLaTeX example of the beamerposter class}
  \author[sharelatexteam@sharelate.com]{ShareLaTeX Team}
  \institute[Sharelatex University]
  {The ShareLaTeX institute, Learn faculty}
  \date{\today}
  \logo{\includegraphics[height=7.5cm]{SharelatexLogo}}

  \begin{document}
  \begin{frame}{} 
    \vfill
    \begin{block}{\large Fontsizes}
      \centering
      {\tiny tiny}\par
      {\scriptsize scriptsize}\par
      {\footnotesize footnotesize}\par
      {\normalsize normalsize}\par
      ...
    \end{block}
    
    \end{block}
    \vfill
    \begin{columns}[t]
      \begin{column}{.30\linewidth}
        \begin{block}{Introduction}
          \begin{itemize}
          \item some items
          \item some items
          ...
          \end{itemize}
        \end{block}
      \end{column}
      \begin{column}{.48\linewidth}
        \begin{block}{Introduction}
          \begin{itemize}
          \item some items and $\alpha=\gamma, \sum_{i}$
          ...
          \end{itemize}
          $$\alpha=\gamma, \sum_{i}$$
        \end{block}
        ...

      \end{column}
    \end{columns}
  \end{frame}
\end{document}

Most of the content in the poster is created inside a block environment, this environment takes as parameter the title of the block.

The environment columns enables multi-column text, the environment \column starts a new columns and takes as parameter the width of said column. All $L a T e X$ units can be used here, in the example the column width is set relative to the text width.

Open an example of the beamerposter package in ShareLaTeX