KIB Talks: Somewhere between BioRender and PowerPoint – taming vector graphics for your biomedical research figures

In this hands-on workshop, we will explore the role that vector graphics editing tools play in providing a mid-point between the expressivity of BioRender and the practicality of PowerPoint. We will perform a number of exercises with Inkscape, a vector graphics editor. We will use it for precise and flexible scientific illustrations. Inkscape produces sharp printouts and renderings at unlimited resolution. It is not bound to a fixed number of pixels like raster graphics. It is free and open-source software. 

After producing a few figures, we will learn how to render a proper-resolution PNG figure and an infinite resolution SVG figure to include in MS Word documents. We will also learn to import an infinite resolution SVG or PDF figure into LaTeX documents. Please, bring a laptop with Inkscape and MS Word already installed on it. If you are a LaTeX user, please have your Overleaf account ready.

Mario Romero is a Senior Associate Professor in Immersive Visualization at the Department of Science and Technology (ITN) at Linköping University. He is the National Technical Manager of the Swedish research infrastructure for data analysis and visualization, InfraVis. Prof. Romero is the scientific lead of Visual Sweden and the head of the unit Immersive Visualization at LiU. He is a Fulbright Scholar from Ecuador and a postdoc at Uppsala University, a doctoral graduate of Georgia Tech (PhD Computer Science, 2009), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Master Computer Science, 2001), and Universidad San Francisco de Quito (BS Industrial Engineering and BS Construction Engineering , 1996). He is also a technical co-founder of BrailleTouch, a smartphone keyboard for blind users, and Anymaker AB, a tablet application for sketching in 3D. Dr. Romero's research centers in Human-Computer Interaction, Immersive Visualization, and Ubiquitous and Accessible Computing.