NOTE: This poster template is retired in favour of a totally rewritten version, though it is still under developement and this one does some things (like landscape orientation) better.
HYposter is a style file for beamerposter whose purpose is to simplify the process
of making scientific posters that have a University of Helsinki look with LaTeX.
HYposter tries to look like the "tighter" version of the official poster style.
beamerposter is a LaTeX package which uses beamer for typesetting posters.
HYposter is based on the Icy theme by Philippe Dreuw, although diverging rapidly.
LaTeX with beamer and beamerposter. Most modern LaTeX installations come with
beamer included, but you must install beamerposter yourself.
You also need pdf versions of the University of Helsinki flame logos for each faculty. Unfortunately these can't be provided here as they are under copyright. If you are university staff, you can get them (like I did) by downloading them from the official graphics repository. Unfortunately they are mostly not available in pdf format, so you must download them in some other format and convert and rename. They are available in eps format, but for some reason the epstopdf tool crashes on some of them.
Aternatively, if you are university staff, send a request to me at
olli.wilkman@iki.fi and I will send the pdf logos to you and save you the trouble.
A version which allows eps logos is on the todo-list, but does not seem likely.
Once you have beamerposter and the template set up in your LaTeX installation or working directory, using HYposter is fairly straightforward. Open one of the supplied templates (either two- or three-column or landscape), and follow the five steps given in the template:
- Select your language.
- Check that the file encoding is correct.
- Choose the colour scheme.
- Fill in the title of your poster and your name
- Add the contents of your poster
The title consists of two lines. The first one will be coloured in the faculty colour,
the second one in "silver". Due to technical limitations, you must give these two
parts separately with the \titlestart and \titleend commands.
Give the authors with the \author command. These are put to the right side of the title
in smaller black letters.
The \institute command lets you specify another text block which will go below the
authors in slightly smaller font size.
It's sometimes necessary to include things like logos of various institutes which have
supported or cooperated in the work. These kinds of things can be put in the lower
left corner of the poster with the \leftcorner command.
Longer titles don't fit with the default size. If your title is long, you can use
the \titlesize command to change the size. The default is \titlesize{\VeryHuge}.
The best choice for a longer title is \Huge. If you need to go smaller than that,
your title is probably too long for a poster, but you can try \LARGE.
You can set orientation=landscape in the beamerposter settings to make a landscape
poster. The head part is typeset a bit differently to save space and look better.
The columns are essentially just vertical boxes. There is no wrapping over them, which means that if you put too much stuff into a column, it will simply flow over the bottom edge of the page. You must yourself make sure that your contents fit the columns.
The column width is fixed at the beginning by setting either twocolumn, threecolumn
or fourcolumn (or nothing, which defaults to threecolumn) in the \usetheme options.
This means that you must use that number of \newcolumn commands to make the columns.
Any less and you'll have an empty space; any more, and the additionsl columns will go
outside the page. Four columns are really only meant for landscape orientation, they're
too narrow on a portrait poster.
There are still various issues that could be better. If you have any suggestions or problems, use the issue tracker for this project on Github, or email me.