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Figio poster composition — FigureSpec for conference posters

Overview

Figio's existing multi-panel composition model (FigureSpec YAML → panel rendering → SVG composition → PDF export) maps naturally to conference poster layout. A poster is essentially a large-format figure with:

  • A grid/mosaic layout on a large canvas (A0, A1)
  • Text block panels for title, authors, methods, conclusions
  • Figure panels referencing existing figio outputs or pipeline results
  • An annotation layer for logos, affiliations, QR codes, funding acknowledgements

How it would work

A poster would be defined as a FigureSpec YAML in docs/deliverables/posters/<slug>/poster.yml:

id: fens-2026-swr-detection
target: poster-a0
panels:
  title:
    type: text
    content: "Sharp-Wave Ripple Detection in Human iEEG..."
  methods:
    type: text
    content_file: sections/methods.md
  fig-detection:
    type: figure
    source: figures/swr-detection-rate.yml   # existing figio spec
  fig-spectrogram:
    type: figure
    source: figures/spectrogram-burst.yml
  conclusions:
    type: text
    content_file: sections/conclusions.md
layout:
  type: mosaic
  mosaic: |
    TTTTTT
    MMFFGG
    MMFFGG
    CCCCCC
annotations:
  - type: logo
    position: top-right
    source: assets/lmu-logo.svg

What figio already supports

  • Grid and mosaic layouts with LayoutSpec
  • Layout constraints (equal_height, equal_width, align labels, shared colorbar)
  • Typed annotations (panel_label, callout, arrow, bracket, caption)
  • SVG composition via composer.py → ComposedFigure
  • PDF/PNG export

What would need to be added

  • Text block panel type (currently panels are opaque SVG fragments from renderers)
  • Large-format canvas presets (A0, A1, custom dimensions)
  • Markdown-to-SVG text rendering for content panels
  • Logo/image panel type for static assets
  • Possibly a poster-specific target profile

Priority

Low — the deliverables convention supports manual poster creation now. This would automate the build step for reproducible, version-controlled posters. Worth pursuing when a concrete conference deadline motivates it.