Skip to Main Content

Creating Research Posters

LaTeX Packages for Poster Design

While most LaTeX distributions are not well-suited to making posters right out of the box, there are many LaTeX packages designed to add that functionality. The two most popular seem to be beamerposter, which is a modification of widely-used slide deck package beamer, and tikzposter, which is based on the powerful tikz package for creating graphics in LaTeX.

beamerposter

A thumbnail image of a beamer poster

The package beamer is one of the most popular options for creating presentation slide decks in LaTeX. beamerposter is a modification of that package that takes each slide and turns it into a content box on a poster layout.

The paper "Writing posters with beamerposter package in LaTeX" from The PracTeX Journal, linked below, gives a detailed description of how to create a scientific poster using beamerposter, and Overleaf (a cloud-based LaTeX editor) contains a number of poster templates built using beamerposter.

tikzposter

A thumbnail image of a tikz poster

The package tikzposter is based on TikZ, a package which allows for the creation of coordinate-based diagrams or graphs. Though TikZ can be moderately difficult to work with, tikzposter is much simpler and does not require the user to be familiar with TikZ.

The documentation for tikzposter provides detailed instructions for setting up a poster and Overleaf, mentioned above, also contains multiple poster templates built using tikzposter.