posterdown

Installation

You can install and use posterdown from github using the devtools package as seen below.

devtools::install_github("brentthorne/posterdown")

Overview

The posterdown package provides a familiar workflow for those used to working in RMarkdown. See the skeleton.Rmd that is produced posterdown document for how to go from typical RMarkdown formatting to this: posterdown PDF Poster

This package is currently focused on a single template called posterdown_pdf which is by default a 38in (H) x 45in (W) poster template which allows for custom section headers and content.

Using posterdown from RStudio

To use posterdown from RStudio:

1. Install the latest RStudio.

2. Install the posterdown package:

   devtools::install_github("brentthorne/posterdown")
   

3. Use the New R Markdown dialog to create a conference poster from the templates

   

Customization

Posterdown uses Latex to generate the PDF poster but more specifically it uses the Memoir Latex class. Memoir was chosen for its flexability in page sizing as well as thorough documentation. I am fairly new to the world of Latex and found this class to have a reasonable amount of customization available. If there are any users who think there may be better options for down the road I am more than willing to listen!

YAML OPTIONS

YAML header options have been created to privide more freedom with design (ie colours and sizing) to fit a wide variety of requirments. Here is the default YAML found in the skeleton.Rmd file:

Option	Description
title	Poster title, acts as you would expect from RMarkdown.
author	List of authors which (as of now) only has true support for a single author, however I have provided a hacky way to have many authors until I can find the time to figure out how to impliment something like the rticles packages does
affiliation	Author affiliations, which just as the author section is currently a hacky version of what I would ultimately like to produce.
font_size	Represents the value for \normaltextsize in latex. All other font sizes are adjusted around this, for example, the title in the skeleton document is given the Latex command \Huge, meaning that the title text will be "huge" relative to the font_size chosen. Here is a usefull resource for better understanding the Latex text sizing options.
font_family	Selects the font family to be used on the poster, in the future I will try to mipiment multiple font families for various components of the poster (such as different fonts for the title versus the main body text). For now only standard Latex fonts are availble, see here for a list of possible options.
title_bgcol	The background colour for the title section of the poster (currently using hex values to define this colour)
poster_bgcol	Background colour of the posters main body section.
title_textcol	Colour of the main title text.
header_textcol	Colour of the Section Header Text
cite_col	Colour of the citation link elements when using natbib.
url_col	Colour of URL links specifically
link_col	Colour of in document links (example would be referencing a Figure or a Table)
columnline_col	Colour of the line which divides each column in the poster
poster_height	Height of the final poster output. Units can be: "in", "mm", "cm"
poster_width	Width of the final poster output. Units can be: "in", "mm", "cm"
column_numbers	Number of columns you wish for the poster to have in the main section of the poster.
bibliography	Name of the .bib. file which you are using to source material
output	For generating posterdown_pdf, in the future other poster designs or templates may be made for this package and thus this option in the YAML will be more flexible. For now this is the only option.

Using posterdown outside of RStudio

1. Install pandoc using the instructions for your platform.

2. Install the rmarkdown and posterdown packages:

   devtools::install_github("brentthorne/posterdown")
   

3. Use the rmarkdown::draft() function to create articles:

   rmarkdown::draft("MyPoster.Rmd", template = "posterdown_pdf", package = "posterdown")