Make Scientific Posters Easier Than Using PowerPoint

Agreed on the pricing, and IMO nothing can compare to a real vector graphics editor for posters (either Illustrator or Inkscape). How would you standardize fonts in figures or do true alignments with this tool (or PPT)?

BioRender is cool for premade vector images, but their license (and cost) is still too prohibitive for that, especially for grad students. Bioicons (https://bioicons.com) is a nice FOSS alternative.

The price is quite insane, and a subscription is not really a good fit for something you do not that often. Making posters is not a core activity for scientists, and while Powerpoint is really not a good tool it actually works well enough for the purpose.

Edit: Looking closer the title is deceiving, making posters seems like a new feature, but not the core purpose. Making figures seems to be the main purpose of this product, and that is a lot closer to a core activity for scientists than posters are. Still very expensive, but I could see a lab buying a license or two, mostly for the large library of icons/components.

Yep, a 5-seat personal Office 365 license is $100/year, and academia loves Google's online counterparts which are totally free. My wife who's a PhD also gets a free Adobe CS institute-wide. Very hard to compete with all that.

Overall, when I was doing a data model chart for my current company, I researched good options for doing that in a collaborative manner, and all of them are subscription-based now, which doesn't make sense for making a diagram or two when draw.io is available.

Yes (materials science) - my absolute favorite poster sessions are at Gordon research conference in my sub field, but the big meetings still do the arena style poster sessions, mostly with conventional printed posters

The worst is trying to have remote poster sessions though, haven’t seen one that was worthwhile yet

Yes. I was just at a cancer biology conference with thousands of posters (multiple days). This year, it was also hybrid, where posters also had to uploaded to be viewable by virtual attendees. But these were still full posters, not a slide deck. However, physical posters were still there and much more useful than a digital equivalent would be.

When walking the isles with that many posters, you’re not just looking for ones that you flagged because of the title or abstract. You’re also looking for new work, or things that catch your eye. I stopped and talked to a person who’s poster I just happened to walk by because it had the words “Shannon Entropy” on it. Turned out, I learned something because of it.

Yes still seeing them in photonics. Conference organisers are still a bit ambiguous about how to make the online compatible as many conferences run hybrid, as someone else said it typically doesn't work well, although I think it could work with some of the platforms that are available (like gather town), but typically the conferences are so entrenched with zoom that they don't really try other options.

Yes. At NeurIPS (big AI conference) the vast majority of papers are presented as posters. Getting a paper accepted into the conference proceedings is considered a good achievement, the presentation format doesn't matter so much. Many people prefer going to the poster sessions because the spotlight talks are very short (10 mins) and there are so many attendees that it's difficult to speak to the author. (Though there was serious overcrowding last time because the poster sessions weren't staggered).

Thanks. I’m not a scientist nor do I need to create posters but I love me some information presentation literature.

#betterposter is a great format. Really helps folks get the key message across in a crowded poster hall.

I like the site too, and use it often.

But I find that with more complex "diagrams" (my attempts at somewhat "technical drawings") it can often feel a bit clunky. Small imprecisions add up quick if you e.g. need to snap a bunch of different shapes together and have them meet back up again. Also I found it impossible to create regular pentagons/hexagons/etc-agons - maybe I missed something though.

I use PowerPoint a lot. It's pretty powerful; I wouldn't call it terrible at all. It can be frustrating, sure.

In my world, people either use LaTeX or PowerPoint for making posters. I know it's unfair to suggest that the LaTeX ones are better de facto, but honestly, they are -- it's a pretty big signal that there will be more mathematical content and as a medical physicist, I really enjoy being able to scan things quickly.

> It was surprisingly difficult to find a decent way to render nice-looking web pages with reasonably modern CSS to PDF without having things get cut off or reflowed. I had to use a specific prerelease build of a webkit-based tool to get my template to render correctly. I wonder if there are any better tools in this space these days.

Try Chrome's built-in print-to-PDF. I currently use Ungoogled Chrome to produce PDF documents from HTML+CSS.

(I don't use Chrome for browsing, just for making PDFs. I prefer Firefox for browsing, but found its PDF output inferior.)

It still doesn't support proper CSS printing and layout. You still have to write HTML+CSS that will happen to be processed a certain way by the browser, and it still won't be publishing-quality text justification or line breaking. But I've found it reliable and consistent enough for some kinds of document generation.

Before using Ungoogled Chrome, I spent years struggling with various WebKit-based and Gecko-based scripted setups, and I saw glitchy results, fonts not working right, scaling wrong (sometimes by large ratios), wrapping in odd places, table/rule lines too thick for print or invisible, uneven spacing due to CSS "pixel" rounding making no sense at print scale, much else besides. Trying to work around all the issues took months and probably derailed a project that was depending on this approach to render PDF invoices. When I found a version and configuration that just about worked, I carefuly preserved the exact binary version along with its supporting environment, because new versions tended to break the output in significant ways. With that, I was still never able to get multi-page output and good rendering from the same software, so I chose the latter and made sure I never needed multiple pages.

One day I found producing them from current Ungoogled Chrome without any crazy scripting produced good results and have stuck with that since.

Note that - at least on Mac - Chrome has two separate print-to-PDF paths, which produce different PDF output. One appears to be part of Chrome and I'm guessing it is common to all target OSes. The other goes via the OS, and I found this one produced inferior rendering and different page size and layout. One of the preview options doesn't view the same PDF as the default output operation.

Frankly, I've never seen a portrait format poster :)

In Machine Learning / Computer Vision I've only seen landscape posters.

You mean wider than it is tall? That's pretty much the standard format at least in biology -- it's weird when they want the other way. For example, the ASM (American Society for Microbiology) wants things 8ft (long) by 4ft (high)

https://asm.org/ASM/media/Events-PDF-s-2/Poster-Presenter-Ch...

In the UK all movie posters are "widescreen", which I prefer compared to the US format:

https://www.originalfilmart.com/collections/british-quad-mov...

The poster session is a social occasion. Besides, there's not enough time in the conference to let every attendant present, and most participants need an accepted paper to be granted the funding to attend.

Work presented in a poster doesn't have to be published. And the biggest benefit is you usually get to talk to a person standing with the poster that did the work. Lot's of interesting information comes by that route, not to mention connections.

There is tremendous value in poster session. Most data is prepublication, and getting candid 1 on 1 discussion with others in the field, including potential reviewers, is great. Also, the networking is valuable- many next jobs start in Poster session discussions. And also wandering through rows of posters and having the investigator walk you through the study us a great way to broaden knowledge. In my day some meeting used to have beer/wine at poster sessions. Good stuff.

The poster is an advertisement for the paper. Same goes for oral sessions. Almost all talks include the phrase "for details, see our paper".

Posters are a nice middle ground between an abstract and a full paper. Spending 5 minutes at a poster talking with the author is almost always enough information to decide if you want to read the paper carefully. This is especially important in theoretical fields where it can take hours/days to fully comprehend difficult proofs.

Poster sessions are also important for meeting people in your niche.

To add some complementary points to what others have posted, poster sessions are great for undergraduate students and junior grad students to cut their teeth on presenting research in a lower pressure environment. Plus networking — the poster sessions can be great for established researchers who might be recruiting students and postdocs