quarto-sciposter: scientific posters from Quarto markdown

Introducing quarto-sciposter, a Quarto extension for producing flexible scientific conference posters with Typst.

I have made more than a few conference posters by copying text and figures into a slide deck, then spending the last few hours before printing moving boxes by a few pixels. It works, but it is hard to repeat, difficult to review, and easy to break when a figure changes.

quarto-sciposter is a Quarto extension I built to make that workflow more reproducible. It takes a plain Quarto Markdown document and renders a scientific poster with Typst, which is bundled with recent versions of Quarto. There is no separate LaTeX installation and no need to build the entire layout by hand.

The package is intended for the parts of poster production that should be repeatable: poster size, column layout, typography, logos, figure placement, references, and a footer. The writing and the choices about what belongs on the poster are still mine. That is the useful division of labor.

A poster is a document, not a slide with a large page size

I wanted a poster format that treats the document as a document. The source is Markdown, headings organize the content, code chunks can create figures, and the same source can be rendered again when a result changes. That is especially helpful for an R-based project, where the analysis, figures, and poster should not be separate final versions of the same work.

The format supports poster sizes from a custom 48 by 36 inch layout to A-series sizes, with one to five columns. It includes controls for title bars, logos, references, figures, QR codes, callout boxes, evidence strips, and a prominent takeaway. It also includes a draft mode for checking the amount of content before the poster reaches the printer.

Here is the smallest starting point:

quarto use template chrischizinski/quarto-sciposter

That command copies the extension and a template.qmd file into a new project. For an existing Quarto project, add the format instead:

quarto add chrischizinski/quarto-sciposter

Then render a poster with:

quarto render my-poster.qmd --to sciposter-typst

The beginning of the document declares the poster rather than relying on manual page setup:

---
title: "Poster title"
author: "Your name"
format:
  sciposter-typst:
    poster:
      size: "48x36"
      columns: 3
      theme: generic
      footer: "Conference 2026"
---

From there, the body is ordinary Quarto Markdown. A figure generated in an R chunk is part of the poster source, and a change to the analysis can flow into a new poster PDF without another round of copying and pasting.

Making it your poster

The point of the format is not to force every poster into the same visual style. Most customization happens in the document YAML, so a project can have its own colors, typography, size, logos, and footer without editing the extension.

Start with one of the supplied themes, generic or unl, then override only the parts that belong to the project. This example changes the primary and accent colors, uses a distinct heading font, sets the type scale explicitly, and adds institutional logos:

format:
  sciposter-typst:
    poster:
      size: "48x36"
      columns: 3
      theme: generic
      colors:
        primary: "#0D3B66"
        accent: "#E07A5F"
      fonts: ["Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica"]
      heading-fonts: ["Source Serif Pro"]
      base-font-size: 28pt
      title-font-size: 72pt
      footer:
        left: "American Fisheries Society 2026"
        right: "your-project.org"
logos:
  left: [logos/university.svg]
  right: [logos/funder.png]

The body has its own layout controls. A takeaway makes one result readable from across the aisle, a poster-box groups supporting material, and a poster-grid places related items on a shared row. They are ordinary fenced divs in the source:

::: {.takeaway label="Key finding"}
Catch rates fell after the regulation change.
:::

::: {.poster-box title="Methods"}
Brief text, a figure, or a table that readers should consider together.
:::

For a more specific change, the extension also exposes theme-overrides. That is useful when, for example, the title bar and section bars need different colors, or a project needs a custom heading treatment. The full set of options and layout blocks is in the quarto-sciposter README.

An example from AFS 2026

I used quarto-sciposter to make a poster for the 2026 American Fisheries Society meeting: tidycreel: A Unified R Framework for Modern Creel Surveys. It is a useful example of the type of project I had in mind: a poster that needs to explain a technical workflow, show figures and a code-adjacent conceptual structure, include several authors and affiliations, and remain readable from a few feet away.

The poster is a PDF, but its source is still a Quarto document. That means I can adjust a figure, revise a sentence, add a collaborator, or change the conference footer without rebuilding the layout from scratch.

The source and installation instructions are available at github.com/chrischizinski/quarto-sciposter. I will keep adding examples as I use the format for different poster sizes and types of analysis.