Automating Poster Creation with Latex

This semester I will be serving in OU COB Research Colloquium. We organize research presentations in college of business. As part of my duties I was tasked with creating posters. I considered my options and decided that creating new posters every other week was too much work.

So I created a tex file that grabs the relevant information with datatool package and uses a beamer template to generate the poster.

This is the relevant piece of Latex code.

\usepackage{datatool} % TO READ DATA FROM FILE
% READ PARAMETERS FROM FILE
\DTLsetseparator{ = } % SEPARATOR, WHITE SPACES ARE NECESSARY
% Loads mydata.dat with column headers key and value
\DTLloaddb[noheader, keys={key,value}]{data}{data.dat}
\newcommand{\missingcommand}[1]{\DTLfetch{data}{key}{#1}{value}}
 
\title[Beamer Poster]{Business Research Colloquia}
\date{\missingcommand{cqDate}, \missingcommand{time}, \missingcommand{location} }

The data is formatted as follows in a file called data.dat:

cqDate = February 22\textsuperscript{nd}, Friday
time = 13:00 - 14:00
location = Copeland 601
author1 = Dr. Zoidberg
title1 = Use of Tentacles in Human Relations
abstract1 = "Tentacles, mandibles and pinchers are some of the most popular ways to interact with our surroundings. Unfortunately beyond obscure Japanese sources the use of tentacles have received scant attention."
author2 = Prof. Farnsworth
title2 = Expectation Disconfirmation via Delivery of Good News
abstract2 = "Good news everyone. I invented a machine that would make everyone attend the research colloquia."

So that once rendered, the poster looks like this:

All mentions of author names, titles, abstracts, dates, times and locations are drawn from the data file.

I drew a lot of inspiration from this stack exchange post by Michael P on datatools: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/322198/88794

The poster theme used in this poster was derived from this template by Nathaniel Johnston: http://www.nathanieljohnston.com/2009/08/latex-poster-template/