FrameSeq Docs

Posters and print#

A poster is a presentation made for paper: one page, laid out with the same commands as a slide, and printed at the size of the sheet.

poster({
  title: "Diffusion Language Models",
  subtitle: "From iterative recovery to continuous state spaces",
  author: "Ada Lovelace · Alan Turing",
  institute: "University of Cambridge",
  date: "NeurIPS 2026",
}).grid(3);

at("cell0/introduction").card();
text("Introduction").title();
text("Autoregressive models write one token at a time…");

at("cell1/method").card();
text("Method").title();
math`p_\theta(x_{t-1} \mid x_t)`;

at("cell2/results").card();
text("Results").title();
chart("bar", { Baseline: 31, Ours: 74 }).unit("%");
qr("https://example.com/paper").width(220);

The live poster example is built from gallery/slides/poster.slides.ts, with tables, charts, a QR code, and citations from a BibTeX file.

poster() starts an A0 portrait presentation in the poster theme and begins its one page, so the call can go straight on to the page's layout. Its options are those of presentation(), so size, orientation, and theme change any of the three.

Paper sizes#

Any presentation can be made for paper with size:

presentation({ title: "Handout", size: "A4" });
presentation({ title: "Conference poster", size: "36x48in" });
presentation({ title: "Wall chart", size: "A1", orientation: "landscape" });

The named sizes are "A0" to "A5", "letter", "legal", and "tabloid"; others are written as width by height with a unit, "mm", "cm", or "in". A named sheet stands upright unless orientation: "landscape" turns it, and a written size stands as written.

Canvas units and printed sizes#

The canvas keeps units of its own: 1600 across the paper's short side, the long side following the paper, so an A0 sheet is 1600 × 2262. Numbers in .position(), .width(), and .size() are these units, and so are the theme's type and spacing, which is why a poster laid out with the commands of a slide also looks right. width or height in the options gives the canvas more or fewer units.

For a measurement on the printed sheet, use mm() and pt():

image(logo).width(mm(60));          // 60 mm wide on the sheet
text("Contact").size(pt(28));       // 28 pt type on the sheet
line().strokeWidth(mm(1.5));

They convert to canvas units at the paper's scale, wherever they appear, including calc() expressions, presentation({ font }), and a theme's spacing. On a presentation for the screen, pt() and mm() keep CSS's meaning.

The poster theme#

The poster theme opens the page with a band holding the title, subtitle, authors, institute, and date, all taken from the presentation's options. Under it, the grid's cells are columns without a surface of their own, and each card() region is a block with an accent rule across its top; .title() text heads a block like a section of a paper.

The band comes from the theme option chrome.header, so a theme of your own can have one:

const lab = defineTheme({
  name: "lab-poster",
  extends: "poster",
  colors: { accent: "#0f766e" },
  chrome: { headerBackground: "#134e4a", headerForeground: "#f0fdfa" },
});

poster({ title: "…", theme: lab }).grid(4);

Checking a poster#

frameseq check measures a poster as it measures slides, and judges type by its printed size. The smallest readable type grows with the canvas: 14 units on a 1280-wide slide, and the same share of a poster's short side, which on an A0 sheet is about 21 pt. A finding on paper gives both sizes:

WARNING Slide 1 "Poster" [font-too-small]
  Font size 10px (15pt printed) is below the recommended 14px (21pt printed) minimum.

Printing#

Every export prints the page at the paper's size:

  • frameseq pdf makes a PDF of the sheet, 841 × 1189 mm for A0, still vector throughout, so a print shop can use it as it is.
  • frameseq pptx makes a PowerPoint slide of that size, with editable text, tables, and charts.
  • frameseq typst writes a Typst page of that size.

A poster is a single page, so the presentation's other features, presenter view and reveal steps among them, simply have nothing to do. A presentation made for paper may still have several pages, such as a set of handouts, each begun with slide().

Figures for a paper#

A figure for a paper is the smallest piece of print: one canvas, no margins, placed on a page of the paper at a known width. figure() starts one:

figure({ title: "Method", width: 1600, height: 820 });

at("encoder").panel("(a) Encoder layer").canvas().position({ x: 20, y: 20 }).width(620).height(780);
// ...

The canvas has the units you give it, 1600 × 900 by default, and prints 170 mm wide, across the page of most papers; printWidth: "85mm" makes it one column of two, and centimetres, inches, and points work too. The paper follows the canvas, so the figure above prints at 170 × 87.1 mm. The page has no margins, title bar, footer, or page number, and is a canvas from the start; theme, font, and background work as for presentation().

frameseq check judges a figure's type as it prints in the paper: 6 points is about the smallest that reads, which is 20 units on a 1600-wide figure printed 170 mm wide.

WARNING Slide 1 "Method" [font-too-small]
  Font size 14px (4pt printed) is below the recommended 19.9px (6pt printed) minimum.

frameseq pdf makes a one-page PDF of exactly the printed size, vector throughout, for \includegraphics in LaTeX at its natural size. frameseq png makes a picture of it, twice the canvas's size unless --scale says otherwise, for a paper or a page that takes pictures.