drposter: Generate Academic Posters in R Markdown and CSS

Ben Bucior¹, <Your name here>²

1. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

2. Earth

Overview

• Template for writing HTML/CSS posters using Rmarkdown
• Same conventions as pandoc presentations (e.g. reveal.js)^1–3
• Separates content from presentation
• Goal: automatically get consistent spacing from specifications instead of a manual layout

Rmarkdown structure

See also the source code and compiled pdf for this poster on Github.

---
title: Title of your document within R Markdown's YAML header
output: drposter::drposter_poster
---

# {.col-3}
## Overall document columns (`<h1>`)

Content is organized using headers as sections.  Level 1
sections define the overall layout of subblocks.  Use the
`.col-x` class to use x columns for subblocks.

## Another left column block

You can place multiple subblocks within the same overall
.col-x, for example to get a 3-column layout like this
example code here.

# {.col-3}
## Individual content blocks (`<h2>`)

Actual content goes within the level 2 blocks, which have
two inner columns by default, e.g. for figures.

![](path_to_figure.jpg)

Most of the markdown commands seem to work, though there
are probably still some that are untested.

# {.col-3}
## Use this div to write your references in a section:

<div id="refs" class="references"></div>

Licensing

3rd party

• Package inspired by reveal.js presentation framework¹ and its R package²
• Fonts under their respective licenses
• Logo: thanks to Openclipart for the CC0 graduation cap image, hexSticker for sticker generation, and bcbioSmallRna for a helpful sticker example
• See CitationStyles.org and the CSL project⁴ for more info about citation options (CC BY SA 3.0)

This package

• drposter may be used under different licenses at your option
• Entire R package: GPLv3 (like R markdown)
• Files for the drposter pandoc template: same conditions as the official pandoc templates
• Poster CSS: CC0 public domain

Community

For more information, please visit the project page at https://github.com/bbucior/drposter. Feel free to report issues, pull requests, or general comments on Github.

How to use this package

Installation and updates

1. devtools::install_github("bbucior/drposter", dep=FALSE) (or install_local on a downloaded copy) to install/update the package
2. In RStudio, you can find the format listed as a template under the “New R Markdown” wizard, or use the command line.
3. Template files are cached in drposter_files/ to decouple your poster from the installed package version. Use drposter_update to resync them.

Customizing the template

• Avoid modifying drposter_files/
• Indirectly override those rules in your own custom.css or equivalent
  • Easier to see and share your changes
  • Decouples your modifications from the base drposter styles
• Customize the format of the bibliography^5,6 using a CSL style⁴

Export

• View and “print as PDF” from Chrome⁷
• Be sure to save a PDF (and possibly html with self_contained: true) to archive your project at the end, in case there are changes in pandoc, rmarkdown, etc.
• You can also render the poster in other formats, such as github_document or revealjs::revealjs_presentation

Reproducible research

Directly include plots

Directly include stats

##      speed           dist       
##  Min.   : 4.0   Min.   :  2.00  
##  1st Qu.:12.0   1st Qu.: 26.00  
##  Median :15.0   Median : 36.00  
##  Mean   :15.4   Mean   : 42.98  
##  3rd Qu.:19.0   3rd Qu.: 56.00  
##  Max.   :25.0   Max.   :120.00

Customizable themes

Note the features for theming. If you had a special class attached to the .level1 or .slides/theme, you could use a general descendent selector to automatically get theming support, then break up these details into separate theme files.

Default theme

This is an example of the default theme.

Minimalist theme

This is an example of the minimalist theme.

See also

• tikzposter latex template, and its example themes for inspiration https://bitbucket.org/surmann/tikzposter/downloads/
• Other R markdown templates with their advantages/disadvantages (pdf compatibility, consistent syntax with flexdashboard, etc.)

References

(1) http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/#/.

(2) https://github.com/rstudio/revealjs.

(3) http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/developer_custom_formats.html.

(4) https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles.

(5) http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/authoring_bibliographies_and_citations.html.

(6) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41532707/include-rmd-appendix-after-references.

(7) Limited testing shows that Firefox also works, but it doesn’t yet apply experimental CSS rules for page size.