KIAS Summer School poster

Generates the poster for the KIAS Summer School on Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology — a white layout with a SPHEREx all-sky banner and a SPHEREx spacecraft, rendered to SVG, PNG, and a print-ready vector PDF.

The engine (posterkit/) is year-agnostic. Each year lives under years/<year>/ and holds one poster.yml (all content and layout settings) plus its images. To make a new year, copy an existing years/<year>/ directory and edit its poster.yml.

posterkit/          reusable engine
  render.py           builds the SVG and renders SVG/PNG/PDF from poster.yml
  imageprep/          banner + spacecraft image preparation scripts
  assets/             year-invariant assets (KIAS logo, style reference)
years/2026/
  poster.yml          content + layout for the 2026 poster
  images/             SPHEREx sources + cutouts (downloaded, not committed)
  drafts/             generated output (not committed)

Setup

Run these from the repository root (where pyproject.toml lives). Use -e (editable) so edits to posterkit/ take effect without reinstalling.

Option 1 — conda + pip

conda env create -f env.yml       # also runs `pip install -e . --no-deps`
conda activate kias-poster

Option 2 — conda + uv

Same as Option 1, but uv resolves the editable install faster. uv uses the active conda environment (add --python "$(which python)" if it does not detect it).

conda env create -f env.yml
conda activate kias-poster
uv pip install -e . --no-deps     # conda already installed the dependencies

Option 3 — uv only (no conda)

uv installs every dependency from PyPI, so conda is not required. The dependencies are declared in pyproject.toml.

uv venv --python 3.12
source .venv/bin/activate          # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
uv pip install -e .

Sanity check any option with:

python -c "import posterkit; print(posterkit.__file__)"

Notes:

• cairosvg needs the native cairo library. Conda (Options 1 and 2) provides it. For the uv-only path on macOS, run brew install cairo; on Debian/Ubuntu, apt install libcairo2.
• Korean text uses the system font "Apple SD Gothic Neo" on macOS. On Linux, install a CJK font, e.g. apt install fonts-noto-cjk; rendering falls back to "Noto Sans CJK KR" automatically.

Build

# once after cloning: download SPHEREx source images + rebuild the cutouts
python -m posterkit.imageprep.fetch_images --dir years/2026/images

# render the poster into years/2026/drafts/
python -m posterkit --year years/2026

fetch_images is needed once after cloning: the SPHEREx all-sky maps and spacecraft are downloaded (not committed) and the oval cutouts are rebuilt. The KIAS logo (posterkit/assets/KIAS-banner.png) is the only image stored in the repo.

Outputs land in years/2026/drafts/ as *.svg, *.png (2040x2880), and *.pdf (vector; use this for printing — sized for B3 / the ISO 1:√2 family).

Editing a year

Edit years/<year>/poster.yml. It has two sections:

• content — the words and people, edited every year: title, English subtitle, section label, the topics + lecturers, logistics rows (dates, venue, audience), organizing committee, contact, footer, and the QR URL.
• render — layout and assets, edited only when the design changes:
  • blend — craft (cut-out spacecraft over the oval banner) or null (banner only).
  • center_image — the oval banner image; set to null to drop it.
  • craft_box, craft_flip, craft_rotate — size / position / orientation of the spacecraft.
  • show_qr, qr_url, kias_logo — the bottom-right QR code and logo.

Image paths in poster.yml that start with assets/ resolve under posterkit/assets/; all other paths resolve under the year directory.

Starting a new year

cp -r years/2026 years/2027
# edit years/2027/poster.yml, swap in years/2027/images/ as needed
python -m posterkit --year years/2027

Image assets (regenerating)

fetch_images downloads the sources and rebuilds everything. The individual steps, if you want to run them by hand (from the repo root):

python -m posterkit.imageprep.cut_oval  years/2026/images/SPHEREx_StarsRGB.jpg years/2026/images/SPHEREx_StarsRGB_cut.png
python -m posterkit.imageprep.cut_oval  years/2026/images/SPHEREx_LinesRB.jpg  years/2026/images/SPHEREx_LinesRB_cut.png
python -m posterkit.imageprep.merge_oval years/2026/images/SPHEREx_LinesRB_cut.png years/2026/images/SPHEREx_StarsRGB_cut.png years/2026/images/SPHEREx_Merged_cut.png

• cut_oval — elliptical alpha mask to drop the black around an all-sky oval.
• merge_oval — blends two oval cutouts (left half / right half).

The spacecraft PNG is already transparent; the engine trims it to content at render time, so there is no separate satellite-cutout step.