Paper2Poster — Conference Poster Skill (You as Conductor)

Paper2Poster — Conference Poster Skill (You as Conductor)

Convert a paper PDF into an academic conference poster (HTML/PNG) by walking a small set of CLI scripts. You are the conductor: this file is the recipe, not an orchestrator. There is no run_pipeline.py — at each step you run one Bash command, read the intermediate artifact, and ask the user for confirmation at the decision points below.

PDF
  → parse_pdf.py            (MinerU → content.md + figures/)
  → intake QA               (you ask size/venue/authors/visual policy)
  → auto_outline.py         (digest.json + assets[])
  → choose visuals          (you read parsed/figures/ + captions: which sections use an original figure, which use text)
  → outline.json            (you write from content.md; user confirms)
  → poster.html             (you hand-author the poster: original figures where they help, text elsewhere)
  → render + score          (Playwright PNG → deterministic geometry check + your own visual read + blind-reader content quiz)
  → iterate on poster.html  (edit + re-render + re-score until it reads like a real poster)
  → poster.png

problem_context, method_main, and result_evidence are a useful reading-order spine to think about — what's the paper about, how does it work, what's the evidence. For each, decide what carries it best: an original paper figure if one reads well at poster scale, or text (a worded explanation, a labelled box, a short list) if no figure fits. There is no figure quota — use as many or as few original figures as the content calls for, down to zero. A text-only section, or a text-only poster, is a legitimate outcome when the figures don't earn their place.

How you run this skill

This skill only works if you execute it as a sequence of small Bash + Read + AskUserQuestion turns. Do not try to short-circuit it.

1. Run one step at a time with the Bash tool, exactly as written below. Use absolute paths under ${SKILL_DIR} (the directory this skill lives in — e.g. <…>/paper2anything/paper2poster; set it once per shell with export SKILL_DIR=<…>/paper2anything/paper2poster).
2. Read the intermediate artifact before moving on:
   • after Step 3: the figures you considered, viewed in parsed/figures/ (and their captions in digest.json), and which sections you decided to carry with text instead,
   • after Step 5: your rendered poster.png, plus your visual read and the blind-reader quiz result.
3. Pause for the user at the decision points with AskUserQuestion:
   • After Step 2 — intake: size, venue, author block, visual policy.
   • After Step 3 — is your per-section visual plan (which sections use an original figure, which use text) acceptable?
   • After Step 4 — is the outline structure acceptable?
   • After Step 8 — accept the poster, or revise/restyle it?
4. Let the content decide whether a section gets a figure. Use an original paper figure where one genuinely helps; carry a section with text when no figure earns its place. Don't pad the poster with weak figures to hit a count, and don't strip a figure that's doing real work. A text-only section — or a text-only poster — is fine.
5. Score every render, then iterate (Steps 5–7). After each render, run the deterministic geometry check and look at the PNG yourself (your visual read — hierarchy/density/balance/readability); run the blind-reader content quiz (Step 7) at milestones rather than on every micro-edit (it spawns a subagent, so it costs more than reading a PNG). Let what they surface drive the next edit; don't ship the first render unscored. The geometry check is two-sided: not just "no overflow" but also a fill ratio ≥ 0.95 — a poster that fits but leaves large whitespace (or shrinks text to do so) fails and must be iterated. Verify this gate yourself; how you reach it is your judgment.
6. Don't overwrite a good render — keep scored candidates. Iteration is not always monotonic: an edit aimed at one issue can regress overall quality, and the version you had three edits ago may have read better. Before a non-trivial restyle or structural change, save the current render as a numbered candidate (e.g. copy poster.html/poster.png to poster_candN.html/poster_candN.png) and record its scores. Pick the final from the best-scoring candidate, not just the latest edit. Never let a higher-scoring intermediate be silently overwritten by a worse one.
7. On error, stop and diagnose. Do not silently fall back to a degraded path to "make it run."