postr

Prepare reproducible conference posters using R Markdown

Overview

Although several workflows are currently available for academic poster preparation none of them are ideal. Commonly, point-and-click software is used to arrange poster content regardless of the analysis pipeline. Most of these software tools are proprietary, thus trapping our content. Typical free and script based tools such as \(\LaTeX\) might not be appealing or seem as complex as using a point-and-click tool.

This package provides templates and helper functions to prepare R Markdown based conference posters with a free and reproducible workflow and produce output both in html for hosting and png for printing. Relies on the flexdashboard package to easily define poster layout.

Dependencies

This poster template depends on the following R packages

• rmarkdown
• flexdashboard
• webshot

Preparing a new poster

In order to use this poster template, you need to:

1. Install the odeleongt/postr package from github
   devtools::install_github("odeleongt/postr")
2. Install the PhantomJS library
   webshot::install_phantomjs()
3. Create a new R Markdown document in Rstudio based on the poster template, or run
   rmarkdown::draft("my_poster.Rmd", template = "poster", package = "postr")
4. Render a printable A1 image
   postr::render("my_poster/my_poster.Rmd")

References

• JJ Allaire, Yihui Xie, Jonathan McPherson, Javier Luraschi, Kevin Ushey, Aron Atkins, Hadley Wickham, Joe Cheng and Winston Chang (2017). rmarkdown: Dynamic Documents for R. R package version 1.8. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rmarkdown
• Barbara Borges and JJ Allaire (2017). flexdashboard: R Markdown Format for Flexible Dashboards. R package version 0.5.1. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=flexdashboard
• Winston Chang (2017). webshot: Take Screenshots of Web Pages. R package version 0.5.0. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=webshot