# Conference posters

Three wyrd sisters, poster, presentation and paper attend upon the ritual for conjuring an academic career. Of these, poster is the least regarded, but is sometimes necessary for all that.

## Hacks

See PDFs for some useful practical mechanics of design and printing.

Pro-tip: if you are plotting using python, one should be aware that seaborn has a poster mode for scaling line widths and fonts sensibly.

## Biorender poster

I do not know if biorender poster is any good, but it was created AFAICT by scientific communication experts, unlike many tools in this domain which were created by scientists or graphic designers, or in the case of Microsoft Powerpoint, a committee containing none of the above.

## Scribus

Scribus is a good open source desktop publisher system (think InDesign, but free, with all the good and bad that this entails.)

The in-built LaTeX renderer does not support big font sizes per default but one can force that manually by overriding the supplied preamble.

This still doesn’t get you the correct margins, which matters for long equations. For that you need Chloé-Agathe Azencott’s LaTeX geometry hacks. Combining these:

\documentclass[$scribus_fontsize$]{extarticle}
\usepackage[left=0cm,top=0cm,right=0cm,bottom=0cm,nohead,nofoot, paperwidth=$scribus_realwidth$pt,paperheight=$scribus_realheight$ pt]{geometry}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{fourier}% uses Utopia font for text and math

\begin{document}

{
\fontsize{48pt}{48pt}
\selectfont
\begin{align*}
\mathcal{A}\{c\phi\}(\xi)&= c^2\mathcal{A}\{\phi\}(\xi)\\
\mathcal{A}\{\phi(r t)\}(\xi)&= \frac{1}{r} \mathcal{A}\{\phi\}\left(\frac{\xi}{r}\right)\\
\mathsf{E}\left[ \mathcal{A}\{S_1\phi + S_2\phi'\}(\xi)\right]
&=\mathcal{A}\{\phi\}(\xi)+ \mathcal{A}\{\phi'\}(\xi) \\
\end{align*}

where $$\{S_i\}$$ are i.i.d. Rademacher variables.
}

\end{document}

## Incoming

• Strong Scientific Posters: Presenting science concisely with Bruce Kirchoff

• How to create a better research poster in less time (#betterposter Generation 2).

• OSF

• Francl (2023)

Once touted as an innovative way to present results, sure to become the preferred mode of presentation by top scientists, the poster session quickly devolved into a venue for primarily graduate students and postdocs. Why do we consider a poster to be a second-class presentation? Are we simply stuffy and unwilling to change the nearly two-century-old style of scientific meetings? Or is there something inherent in the poster genre that makes it less attractive to experienced scientists or better suited to trainees? I rummaged through old newsletters and conference proceedings to find out what drove the adoption of the scientific poster session, and what might have led to the narrowing of its pool of presenters.

## References

Francl, Michelle. 2023. Nature Chemistry 15 (1): 1–2.

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