Create your next conference poster with LaTeX | Hacker News Reader

Create your next conference poster with LaTeX

latextemplates.com

99 pointsVelNZ41 comments

What a great website -- CVs, presentations, snippets to copy... even books.

What's the catch? Restrictive licensing? Because this seems too good to be true and free. If this is all just a way to upsell people, I'm in awe.

EDIT: And there's an RSS channel with new additions.

No catch, I started the website as a free resource of LaTeX templates because one didn't exist and I intend to keep template downloads free. All current templates are licensed under creative commons. I do have a few plans for how I can capitalize on the website but templates will always be available for free download and I despise ad-ridden websites so that won't be happening either. If you have any ideas send me an email!

It is getting more and more popular and I am making a little bit of money from it, but it is primarily for the masses. If you like the work please consider donating through Flattr, or better yet, take out an advertisement ;)

This editor is incredible. How did you make it? Can I see the un-minified source code somewhere? I want to learn how to make this.

From the about page, they are separate people:

https://spandex.io/about

http://www.latextemplates.com/about

Nevertheless, I want to make this editor. How?

They are using the ace editor: http://ace.ajax.org/

There's some bootstrap and other jazz, and obviously a server-side component to perform the LaTeX rendering

Thanks! What are they using for the PDF viewer?

pdf.js: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

NOTE: If you do decide to build your own thing, I think it would be cool if you could run LaTeX in the browser directly (I guess you could do this by building pdflatex with emscripten)

Your guess is 100% correct: http://manuels.github.com/texlive.js/website/ (Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5083361)

Works in chrome for mac, but falters on iPad (even though http://caniuse.com/#search=worker says webworkers are supported)

Thank you. Do you know how they did the "intros" -- the dark overlay with popups that point out various buttons / explain concepts? Are they using intro.js, something else, or something they made themselves but haven't released yet?

Also, could you provide more detail about what you mean by "run LaTeX in the browser directly"? It sounds like a fun challenge.

Intros: https://github.com/jeff-optimizely/Guiders-JS

"run LaTeX in the browser directly": Right now it appears to send data back to their servers to compile every time. What would be cool, especially for offline work, is a pure-JS implementation of the rendering engine.

Good-looking web site too!

Unless forced to do otherwise, I always use the memoir document class and compile with xelatex. I've found that to be the best way to get access to fancy features. What about you, who do much more advanced stuff, is that something you use for your templates?

Good work!!!

Are there black and white poster templates? Color printing of posters is expensive and not necessary in many cases.

Usually you can instruct your (color) printer to print in black and white, and it will print in various shades of grey.

You can also do this in acrobat (print to Adobe PDF using black and white)

Typically, people print large posters at places like FedEx Kinko. Converting color posters to B&W ones, although sound trivial conceptually, sometimes poses a practical challenge. One is you don't exactly know how the color posters will look in black and white.

The catch is ads. All joking aside, does anyone else get an interesting sub-set of ads from this site? It seems Google is struggling to determine how to relate the model with relevant keywords. I see Ford(-$), GMC(-$), Cooking Show(-$), Education Program($$$), and Insurance ($$).

I expected New Relic, Databases, Network Security, etc.

Back on topic, great site. Also ranking well in Google! I've come across it a few times through search traffic and HN. While I have no interest in LaTeX, it is interesting to see the results. My TeX days ended when my DS and Algo classes both decided to use it for the bi-weekly homeworks. 60 minutes for homework, 9 hours in TeX.

Normally, this would be 60 minutes for homework, five minutes in TeX, eight hours, fifty-five minutes trying to get that effing figure in the right place.

Of course, it never helps that the 8:55 is usually after midnight.

If your department required TeX, they should have had a template as well.

The ads I used to see (before I started blocking) when I would search for LaTeX stuff were generally related to paint or rubber products... some NSFW.

"60 minutes for homework, 9 hours in TeX."

... 20 hours using microsoft word and the equation editor.

I'm surprised your classes didn't let you submit handwritten assignments.

Yeah, I TeX'd homework for a semester once. It was nice that I could promptly lose it after turning it in, but it took way too much time.

The template is just a theme for beamerposter [1], which is a very nice extension to LaTeX Beamer to make posters.

I've used beamerposter and I'm very happy with it, it is easily customizable (just create a beamertheme<yourname>.sty) so I suggest to make your own theme, maybe with the colors of your institution (for example, I went for a bluish flat theme: http://www.di.unipi.it/~ottavian/files/wavelet_trie_poster.p...)

[1] http://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~dreuw/latexbeamerpo...

I don't understand why you would use LaTeX to lay out a poster. It just doesn't seem like the right tool for that kind of job to me.

I concede that I may be missing something though, since everyone else seems to like it.

It's pretty easy to just re-do your poster with an entirely different content and not have to worry much about layout. For somebody who may be uncomfortable with (expensive) GUIs for poster layout, which would force you to think about every little aspect of design and layout, a LaTeX template does a good job of just getting things done.

Why use vim+makefiles to build a big C/C++ project when you can just use VisualStudioC++ to do it?

LaTeX is a great way to make quality documents, really appealing, with very little investment beyond an afternoon or two of study - and, with sites like this, even less of an investment in LaTeX is required before something useful can be produced.

The beauty of this site is that it presents very tangible aesthetics to a design process that is not usually associated with such results, beyond the cognescenti. LaTeX can easily make appealing, beautiful documents, in the time it takes MS Word to boot its buttonstrips ..

If you've already written a paper in LaTeX, it's easy to copy and paste the equations, diagrams, bibliographies, etc. And they'll look good (especially equations, and also diagrams if you've used something like TikZ.)

It's really good if you want to include lots of "sciency stuff" like formulas, source code and maybe graphs. Also Bibliographies are easy in LaTeX. Plus it's free, and you don't have to learn a new tool.

Just wanted to say a big thank you for this site .. its a really wonderful resource, and has solved a question I've had in my mind for a year or two, with regards to how to handle my personal documentation needs: either a) continue to use an ancient license of MS Word, and OpenOffice/whatever to evade future investments, or b) automate my docs someway, somehow, while still producing aesthetically appealing literature.

So, I've been a big fan of your site, and it has gotten me back into LaTeX after a long hiatus of disinterest, and I'm now producing everything with a plain old text editor - and wow, it really rocks!

Thanks!

Thanks for the high praise! I hope that by the end of the year I've got 100 templates up for an even wider diversity of document needs. Who needs Word anymore?

Honestly, I'm sniffing, but not seeing any reason to go that path. Automated Aesthetics as you offer, indeed, replaces the need .. ;)

I have found that a combination of Scribus, GraphViz, and OmniGraffle are my favourite tools for making conference posters. Scribus has a few quirks, but once you learn them it's pretty easy to be very productive.

Good suggestion. I've also found the baposter template very useful ( http://www.brian-amberg.de/uni/poster/ ).

I've already got another 3 poster templates (including one from the page you linked) about 90% ready to be put up on the site, I just need to find the time to finalize them and put them up. Give me a week or two and check back on the site for more!

Unfortunately it's just me working on the website and I'm also a PhD student so that doesn't leave much time to put up new templates. It doesn't help that the vast majority of them have very poor commenting and odd spacing which needs to be brought in line with the commenting style I use throughout the website.

I've seen your website before. I like it. But: Have you ever considered moving all this (in addition) to github? With every template in a subdirectory. Could make collaborating and bringing other folks in easier. Btw, thanks for not making everything with a colored background in the poster. I always feel like that's a huge waste of ink

Thanks!

I've had a bit of feedback regarding opening up the site and allowing community editing/submission automatically. While I definitely see the value in this approach, I personally believe that the top-down approach is better with regard to quality, consistency and ease of use. I don't want to start a debate on the topic, but lets just say I am happy with the way things are and prefer to keep everything under my control, at least at the moment.

I think you'd find that there are other people who share your values regarding quality. Eventually, you might be able to share the work of maintaining the site with these people and the site will grow more quickly. (And maybe you'll enjoy seeing some new templates appear.) Otherwise, (I think) what will happen is that you'll get tired of maintaining the site and updates will stop.

Anyway, I'm glad your site exists and I appreciate your work.

Just to note that opening it up on Github doesn't necessarily entail a loss of control.

Oh, kind of motivates me to create a poster for a recent software project we did in university. I always wondered how hard it is to create a good poster (especially in LaTeX).

I put down LaTeX when I finished grad school.

Great Repository

Good repository

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