MkPosters

Create posters using Markdown. Supports icons, admonitions, and LaTeX mathematics.

At the moment it is restricted to the specific layout of two-columns-with-banner-at-the-top, as that's what I tend to use. (Pull requests are welcome if you want to make this tool more general.) The poster can be either portrait or landscape.

The library operates by parsing your Markdown into HTML, styling it with CSS, and then opening a webpage that you can export to PDF.

Example

The "source code" for this example is here.

Assumptions

Assumes you have:

• Linux (WSL is fine) or macOS
• Firefox
• Python

Compatibility with other operating systems is probably possible by switching out the version of Dart Sass being used internally.
Compatibility with other browsers is unlikely.

You'll need to be relatively familiar with HTML and (S)CSS to make best use of MkPosters.

Installation

pip install mkposters

Usage instructions

1. Create the appropriate directory structure

foo/
    poster.md
    style.{css,scss} (optional)
    ...any other assets e.g. images...

2. Lay out your poster

poster.md should be formatted in three sections, with a literal "--split--" between each section.

...whatever you want in the banner at the top...

--split--

...whatever you want in the left column...

--split--

...whatever you want in the right column...

3. Build poster

Run from the directory containing foo:

python -m mkposters foo

The first time you do this, MkPosters will attempt to detect your system architecture and install the appropriate version of dart-sass. This was tested working on both an Apple M1 and an Ubuntu x86_64 machine.

This will also automatically watch the foo directory for any updates, and rebuild if necessary.

4. View poster

Now open Firefox (not Chrome etc.) and navigate to localhost:8000.

What you see will be based on the size of your current browser window and may differ from the PDF version. So next hit Control-P and select "Save to PDF". What you see in the print preview is what you'll actually end up with!

Make all your edits until you're happy with the result. Now let's save the result to PDF.

5. Save to PDF

Saving to PDF can be quite finickity, and in general depends on choice of browser etc. (For what it's worth the following is tested using Firefox on Windows 10 with mkposters running on Ubuntu 20.04 on WSL2.)

In the print dialog window we opened above:

• Destination: "Save to PDF". Do not use "Microsoft Print to PDF".
• Orientation: (portrait or landscape, as desired)
• Pages: Custom: 1
• Paper size: (whatever is desired; current styling works best on paper roughly A4 sized)
• Margins: None
• Options: uncheck "Print headers and footers"

Once again, make sure you're using Firefox. Using other browsers (e.g. Chrome) or other PDF exporters (e.g. WeasyPrint) can introduce a variety of issues, such as saving text as images (which are unselectable in the PDF, and appear slightly pixelated), missing parts of the styling, or having faded colours (looking at you, Chrome).

Functionality

MkPosters comes with a few extra pieces of functionality built in.

Icons

Recalling that Markdown can embed HTML, then icons can be embedded via e.g.

<img style="height: 20pt; width: 20pt" src="icons/fontawesome/brands/github.svg">

where the list of available icons is here.

Mathematics

You can use LaTeX-formatted mathematics. This is done via

\\(inline math\\)
\\[display math\\]

Note the double backslash.

Admonitions

Admonitions can be added using the syntax

!!! admonition_type "Your title here"

    Your text here

where admonition_type is any of these types, e.g. info, tip, etc.

Custom (S)CSS styling

If you want to style your poster in a custom way, then you can include a style.css or style.scss file in your poster directory.

HTML

The Markdown format allows you use arbitrary HTML inside of it.

• The banner section often contains information (titles, authors, logos, URLs etc.) laid out in complicated ways. Directly writing HTML with embedded style attributes is simplest here. See the start of this example.
• HTML can be (ab)used to modify spacing like so. (Analogous to those little \vspaces you definitely never use in LaTeX documents.) In this example we move the content up by 10 points.

<div style="margin-top: -10pt;">
...your content here...
</div>

Future plans?

It'd be nice to support:

• Other poster layouts, e.g. multiple columns;
• Optionally automatically generating the PDF. (Practically speaking probably by automating the Firefox interaction through Selenium.)
• Reducing package size by not including all of the mkposters/third_party/icons directory by default?

Pull requests welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Similar tools

These all support some kind of conversion Markdown -> something.

• For documentation: MkDocs with mkdocs-material.
• For presentations: reveal.js
• For static sites: Hugo or Jekyll