Mercury 2026 Poster Book

Pulls poster submissions from a Google Sheet (Google Form responses) and their associated abstract-graphic images from Google Drive, then builds:

• a PDF poster book (build/latex/main.pdf): title page, table of contents, and one uniformly-formatted page per submission.
• a companion slide deck (build/latex/slides.pdf): a splash slide followed by one slide per submission showing just the title, presenter, image, and session/poster number.

Both are generated from the same fetched data and the same event/config.yaml.

Layout

engine/    reusable, event-agnostic: fetch/render scripts + LaTeX core
event/     this event's config, credentials, and front matter
build/     everything generated (gitignored, safe to delete anytime)

• engine/ is the part meant to be copied wholesale for a future event. See "Reusing this for a future event" below.
• event/ is Mercury 2026-specific: config.yaml, service_account.json (both gitignored), main.tex (the booklet), slides.tex (the slide deck), and assets/ (e.g. a logo image, if you have one).
• build/ is 100% generated — build/data/ (fetched JSON + images) and build/latex/ (rendered content, including the title/splash slide, plus the compiled PDFs and aux files). Nothing in engine/ or event/ ever gets written to during a build, and there's no .tex file to hand-edit for any of the content in "Front matter options" or "Slide deck options" below.

1. Google Cloud setup (one-time)

1. Create/select a project at https://console.cloud.google.com.
2. Enable the Google Sheets API and Google Drive API for it.
3. Create a Service Account (IAM & Admin > Service Accounts), then create a JSON key for it and download it as event/service_account.json (it's gitignored).
4. Share the response Google Sheet with the service account's email (found in the JSON key as client_email), Viewer access is enough.
5. Share the Drive files/folder holding the abstract graphics with that same service account email, Viewer access. The script downloads each image directly by the file id embedded in the sheet's "Abstract Graphic" URL, so the folder itself doesn't need to be listed — just readable.

2. Local setup

pip install -r engine/requirements.txt
cp event/config.example.yaml event/config.yaml
# edit event/config.yaml: spreadsheet_id, sheet_name, front_matter section

You'll also need a LaTeX distribution with latexmk (e.g. TeX Live, MacTeX) to build the PDF.

Front matter options

Everything on the title page is set in event/config.yaml's front_matter section — no .tex editing needed:

Field	Effect if blank/omitted
event_title, event_subtitle	Falls back to generic text
venue	The "Held at ..." line is omitted entirely
event_date	Uses today's date (\today) at build time
logo_file	Path to a logo image, relative to the repo root (put the file in event/assets/, e.g. event/assets/logo.png). Shows a "LOGO HERE" placeholder box if blank or the file doesn't exist
poster_sessions	A list of {location, time} entries, one per session (add/remove entries for a different number of sessions); a blank time is just omitted from that session's line. Also used for the room/time shown on each session's divider page in the book — see "Poster session assignment" below

Poster session assignment

Each presenter (by email) is assigned a session group and a poster number within that group — set in event/config.yaml:

• max_people_per_session: presenters are split into groups of at most this many people.
• assignments_file: where the group/poster-number assignments are persisted (default event/poster_assignments.yaml), keyed by email. Created automatically on first run.

Every fetch is deterministic and stable: existing entries in assignments_file are never reassigned, so re-running after new submissions come in only adds new emails — it fills the earliest group with room (poster numbers restart at 1 for each new group), and never reshuffles anyone already assigned. This file contains attendee email addresses, so it's gitignored — but unlike build/, it's not disposable; deleting it resets everyone's assignment.

The book is ordered by (group, poster number), with a full-page divider between groups showing that session's room/time from front_matter.poster_sessions (group 1 uses the first entry, group 2 the second, and so on). If more groups end up in use than you've configured poster_sessions entries for, generate_latex.py prints a warning and those extra dividers just show the group number with no room/time.

A row with no email address can't be matched reliably, so it's left unassigned (a warning is printed) and placed at the very end of the book under an "Unassigned" divider rather than blocking the build.

Slide deck options

The splash slide is set in event/config.yaml's slides section:

Field	Effect if blank/omitted
event_title, event_subtitle	Falls back to front_matter's title/subtitle, then generic text
event_date	Omitted entirely (unlike the booklet, there's no \today fallback — it's meant to be optional)
background_image	Path to an image, relative to the repo root, shown behind every slide (splash + posters). Blank or missing -> plain white background
session_label_position	"left", "center", or "right" — where the "Session N, Poster M" label sits at the bottom of each poster slide, so you can dodge a busy spot in background_image. Anything else falls back to "left" with a warning
title_width	A fraction of the slide width, (0, 1], that the title/presenter block is allowed to span on each poster slide — narrow it to nudge long titles inward, away from a busy background_image. Missing or invalid falls back to 0.9 with a warning

The splash slide's logo reuses front_matter.logo_file (same placeholder box if blank/missing). Every poster gets one slide, in the same (group, poster number) order as the booklet, showing only the title, presenter, image, and a "Session N, Poster M" label — none of the abstract text, full author list, degree/advisor fields, or session room/time appear on slides.

Required packages

Python (engine/requirements.txt):

• google-api-python-client — Sheets/Drive API calls
• google-auth — service-account authentication
• google-auth-httplib2 — HTTP transport for the auth credentials
• PyYAML — reads config.yaml
• Jinja2 — renders the LaTeX template
• pylatexenc — converts Unicode in abstract text (Greek letters, smart quotes, accented names, etc.) into valid LaTeX automatically

LaTeX (from your TeX distribution; all are standard and included in a full TeX Live/MacTeX install):

• latexmk — build driver (re-runs pdflatex as needed for the TOC)
• geometry — page margins
• hyperref — PDF bookmarks/TOC links
• graphicx — image inclusion
• pgfkeys — key-value options for the \posterpage environment
• parskip — paragraph spacing
• beamer — the slide deck (event/slides.tex)

3. Build

./build.sh

This runs, in order:

1. engine/scripts/fetch_sheet_data.py --config event/config.yaml — reads the sheet; if the same email submitted more than once, keeps only the most recent (by the sheet's Timestamp column) and prints a warning for each one dropped; sorts the remaining rows alphabetically by presenting-author last name; assigns each new presenter a session group + poster number (see "Poster session assignment" below); downloads each row's Abstract Graphic image; and writes build/data/posters.json + build/data/images/.
2. engine/scripts/generate_latex.py — renders every generated .tex file under build/latex/content/ (the booklet's page content and title page, the slide deck's title/poster slides and background/layout setup) from that JSON and event/config.yaml, via the Jinja2 templates in engine/latex/templates/.
3. Two latexmk -pdf -output-directory=../build/latex runs from event/ — one for main.tex (the booklet, -> build/latex/main.pdf), one for slides.tex (the slide deck, -> build/latex/slides.pdf).

Run ./build.sh --skip-fetch to skip step 1 and reuse the existing build/data/posters.json + images — handy when you're only iterating on config.yaml or the LaTeX/templates. Run the Python steps independently (see their --help) if you want to inspect build/data/posters.json before building the PDFs.

Reusing this for a future event

engine/ doesn't know anything about Mercury 2026 — copy it (and build.sh, adjusting paths if you rename folders) into a new project, then:

1. Create a fresh event/ with its own config.yaml (copy config.example.yaml) and main.tex / slides.tex (copy the existing ones — both are already generic, just a few \input lines each).
2. Edit COLUMN_MAP at the top of engine/scripts/fetch_sheet_data.py to match the new form's actual header row — that's the one place this event's Google Form wording is hardcoded.
3. Fill in event/config.yaml: spreadsheet ID, service account key, and the front_matter and slides sections (title, date, logo, sessions, background image).

Everything else (the \posterpage and \posterslide LaTeX commands, the front matter/splash slide layouts, the Jinja2 templates, the Unicode sanitization) is generic and shouldn't need touching.

Notes on placeholders

• Degree program / year / advisor are hidden by default on each poster page — flip \showmetadatatrue in engine/latex/preamble.tex once you want that line to appear. The poster number is always shown regardless.
• Unicode in abstracts (Greek letters, smart quotes, accented names, etc.) is converted to LaTeX automatically by pylatexenc — e.g. π becomes \ensuremath{\pi}. If a character has no known LaTeX representation, it's replaced with a bold ? placeholder in the PDF and generate_latex.py prints a warning naming the character, so it's easy to spot and add a fix for.