Using posterdown to generate reproducible conference posters via RMarkdown > Knitr > Markdown > Pandoc > HTML/CSS > PDF workflow

W. Brent Thorne1, William B. Thorne1

1Department of Earth Science, Brock University

1 Introduction

Welcome to posterdown ! This is my attempt to provide a semi-smooth workflow for those who wish to take their RMarkdown skills to the conference world. Many creature comforts from RMarkdown are available in this package such as Markdown section notation, figure captioning, and even citations like this one. The rest of this example poster will show how you can insert typical conference poster features into your own document.

1.1 Study Site

Here is a map made to show the study site using ggplot2, ggspatial, and sf and you can even reference this with a hyperlink, this will take you to Figure 1.1.

Map of Long Lake eample from the [ggspatial](https://github.com/paleolimbot/ggspatial) package.

Figure 1.1: Map of Long Lake eample from the ggspatial package.

1.2 Objectives

  1. Easy to use reproducible poster design.
  2. Integration with RMarkdown.
  3. Easy transition from posterdown to thesisdown or rticles

2 Methods

This package uses the same workflow approach as the RMarkdown you know and love. Basically it goes from RMarkdown > Knitr > Markdown > Pandoc > HTML/CSS > PDF. You can even use the bibliography the same way (Turner et al. 2014).

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque auctor lorem ex. Pellentesque tempus accumsan nulla, nec eleifend erat rhoncus vel. Ut commodo metus ipsum, sed accumsan risus placerat ut. Proin eu ipsum ut quam maximus elementum. Duis ultricies varius placerat. Sed viverra justo at dignissim efficitur. Duis nec fermentum ex. Nulla ut fermentum purus.

3 Results

Usually you want to have a nice table displaying some important results that you have calcualated. In posterdown this is as easy as using the kable table formatting you are probably use to as per typical RMarkdown formatting. I suggesting checking out the kableExtra package and its in depth documentation on customizing these tables found here. Hopfully I can make this with an inline refernce like, Table 3.1.

Table 3.1: Table caption.
Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width
5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2
4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2
4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2
4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2
5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2

Look at this animation!!!! Figure 3.1.

library(ggplot2)
library(gganimate)
library(gapminder)

ggplot(gapminder, aes(gdpPercap,
                      lifeExp,
                      size = pop,
                      colour = country)) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.7, show.legend = FALSE) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
  scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
  scale_x_log10() +
  facet_wrap(~continent) +
  # Here comes the gganimate specific bits
  labs(title = 'Year: {frame_time}',
       x = 'GDP per capita',
       y = 'life expectancy') +
  transition_time(year) +
  ease_aes('linear')
WOW THIS IS AN AWESOME GIF!

Figure 3.1: WOW THIS IS AN AWESOME GIF!

Using ggplot and patchwork to generate a layout of multiple plots in one figure. The iris dataset was used to generate (a) a line graph, (b) a scatterplot, and (c) a boxplot all together!

Figure 3.2: Using ggplot and patchwork to generate a layout of multiple plots in one figure. The iris dataset was used to generate (a) a line graph, (b) a scatterplot, and (c) a boxplot all together!

4 Next Steps

There is still A LOT of work to do on this package which include (but are note limited to):

5 Conclusion

Figure 5.1: Here is a leaflet figure which whill run as expected online, when printed it will take the last state it is left in beofre choosing to print.

References

Turner, Kevin W., Brent B. Wolfe, Thomas W. D. Edwards, Trevor C. Lantz, Roland I. Hall, and Guillaume Larocque. 2014. “Controls on Water Balance of Shallow Thermokarst Lakes and Their Relations with Catchment Characteristics: A Multi-Year, Landscape-Scale Assessment Based on Water Isotope Tracers and Remote Sensing in Old Crow Flats, Yukon (Canada).” Global Change Biology 20 (5): 1585–1603. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12465.