LaTex Poster Template (BAposter)

You can make great posters with LaTex. However hand-positioning elements through coordinates, adjusting size and margins can be very time-consuming and awkward. Already for quite some time I wanted to post about a particular latex poster template. I used it for two posters in ECRO 2008 and later a poster for FET 2009.

I like about this library that it is very elegant and that conversion from article to poster is effortless. You organize the poster in boxes, which have a header each, and which you align relative to each other using keywords such as below, top, column, row. A code snippet from my FET poster:

\headerbox{Conclusions}{name=conclusions,column=1,below=discussion}{
\begin{itemize}
\compresslist
\item Some properties affect odor coding very strongly (sulfur--containing functional group).
\item Bond saturation affects also seems very relevant (alkyne, alkane, and alkene).
\item Carboxylic acid and aromatic, still seems to be important.
\item Results partly confirm relevance of dimensions of molecular properties suggested by Johnson and Leon
\end{itemize}
}

The image below shows a poster from Ecro 2008. I hope you can see the poster in the correct colors. The title bars should be blue.

The first figure on the left is made in GNU R and is so much better than the other ones created in matlab! The main problem with the matlab figures seems to be in matlab's inability in linux to save figures with transparent backgrounds. I learned a lot about exporting figures in the meantime. See my article on exporting figures from latex.

Thanks to Brian Amberg for his template, called baposter, (ba stands for his initials, I suppose).

For alternatives, another poster template which looks quite usable (I haven't tried it) is A0-poster. See the article about scribus posters on linux.com. I found scribus poster templates: at scribus post and on the official scribus site.

What is your experience with poster presentations in latex?


You might also be interested in my article on exporting figures from matlab. I also wrote an articles about exporting data from matlab and how to get good combinations of linestyles and colors for plots.