Introducing posterly

You finished the paper. Then you remember the poster is due. The night before, instead of getting any rest, you give up on designing anything, pour the whole paper onto one giant sheet packed wall to wall, and call it a poster. posterly exists so that doesn't have to happen.

Making a poster is its own separate job, and it always lands when you have the least time for it: a template that won't behave, text shrunk to fit, a figure that won't sit still, columns that refuse to line up. None of it is the research — it's an evening of fiddly chores.

posterly turns the LaTeX source of your paper into a poster you can proof, edit, and send to print — designed, typeset, and checked — without you wrestling with a template or a drawing tool.

What it does

You upload your paper's LaTeX source (a zip or tar.gz) and pick a size. Add a venue and a logo if you have them; you don't have to. That's the whole brief. What comes back is a finished poster: one clear result up front, the figures that carry it, readable math, and a hierarchy that still reads from across the hall, with your name and where to find the paper.

A poster is a web page, built for print

posterly doesn't squeeze your paper into a poster template. It builds one HTML/CSS document for the exact canvas you choose, then renders it to a print-ready PDF with headless Chromium.

That detail does real work. A 48×36-inch poster isn't an A0 page scaled until it looks close. The page is declared at print size (@page { size: 48in 36in }) and Chromium prints a PDF at exactly that canvas. And the source stays editable to the end: trim two words from a title, give a caption more room, re-balance a column — every one of those is a change in HTML/CSS, not a fight with a drawing tool.

We use HTML/CSS instead of a LaTeX poster class (tikzposter, beamerposter, and the like) because the hard part of a poster is layout, and the web has the better tools for it: grid, flexbox, web fonts, balanced wrapping — and a proofing loop measured in seconds (edit, refresh, look) instead of the recompile, read-the-log, reopen-the-PDF wait.

The quieter advantage matters more: once the poster is a rendered page, layout becomes machine-checkable. Is this column overflowing? Did the footer collide with the body? Did a figure render at zero size? These stop being matters of opinion. They become geometry queries.

Two kinds of checking

So posterly checks two different things in two different ways.

Layout and geometry go to deterministic gates. After every render, automated checks read the page back: column balance, clearance to the footer, the poster squared to the page, broken or zero-size images, stretched figures, typographic widows, blank space padding out a card, leftover LaTeX, a missing local image. They never ask a model whether the poster looks good; they return repeatable failures that have to be fixed.

Whether the meaning holds goes to a second, independent model. Claude Opus — Anthropic's flagship — reads your actual source and builds the poster from the paper itself, so the numbers, equations, and claims come from your file, not from a model's memory. Then GPT, the latest release, reviews it cold, hunting for what geometry can't see: a figure that lost its axis labels, an equation that wrapped into nonsense, a claim that came out stronger than the paper supports. We always run each family's newest flagship, never a cheaper tier. (Equations are set as real math with MathJax, not pasted in as pictures.)

That makes the build a proofing loop, not a one-shot: build, render, run the gates, fix what they flag, render again, until everything clears. Most of the work isn't the first draft. It's that convergence.

You pay the balance only when it's right

You get a watermarked preview, and you check it the way you'd check a print proof: the numbers, the names, the figures. Only when it's right do you approve and pay the balance; then the clean, print-ready PDF arrives, with the editable HTML source. An itemized receipt for whatever you've paid is available any time; you don't have to wait for the balance. Not right yet? Ask for a revision, billed at what it actually costs, never the full sticker price again.

What stays yours

All of it. You keep every right to your work; we claim none. Generation runs in an isolated workspace that reads only what you upload and can't browse the web or pull in anything on its own. Your source goes to the models that build and review it, and nowhere else: it isn't published, indexed, or shared, and no finished file leaves before you approve it. The preview is a watermarked, low-resolution PNG; the clean, print-ready PDF is released only after you sign off.

The engine that builds the poster is open source (AGPL-3.0), so it isn't a black box. What you pay for is the managed run around it: the isolated workspace, no dependencies to install, the layout gates, the independent second-model review, and the finished files delivered to you.

Your research, designed to be seen.

Upload a paper and you'll see a preview before you owe anything beyond the deposit. That's the whole idea.