Options for colored rectangular content containers (boxes)

Question

Today I've decided to learn about writing LaTeX posters. I want to ask if tcolorbox is the right place to focus my effort in creating poster sections.

Here's why I'm asking. The first thing I tried was the package fancybox and the shadowbox environment. As long as I had white background, that looked nice. However, when I changed the background color of the poster and I came to realize that the background color of a shadowbox object is not customizable. In the a0poster document class, at least, that was my experience. When I set background in blue

\usepackage{color} 
\definecolor{page_backgroundcolor}{rgb}{0.0234375, 0.339844, 0.710938}
\pagecolor{page_backgroundcolor}

the background within the shadowbox was blue. It seems not possible to adjust background color.

\shadowbox{\parbox[c][5cm]{0.98\columnwidth}{%
\begin{center}
Some box content here
\par\end{center}%
}}
\par

Then I started looking for alternative box packages.

Staying with a0poster examples, I found tcolorbox. This has more parameters, seems to be fine in a0poster documents. I tested on a beamer poster and the results are also GOOD. Downright surprising, actually. It usually seems to me that beamer contradicts special-purpose packages.

The beamer package has its own block environment, but I find that harder to adjust to taste than tcolorbox in a beamer document.

I want you to tell me if I'm just having beginners luck. Or should I focus on some other box package. When I needed to do color within tables last year, I found there were quite a few problems in adjusting colors in cells and lines and if I'm going to run into that with tcolorbox, you could warn me now.

I also have experimented with tikzposter which offers its own very elaborate system for creating boxes, but I'm not pursuing that right now because it appears to be very specialized (not portable) work. Correct?

If tcolorbox is the right place to focus, let me know. If not, what should I study.

Answer 1

There seems to be no clear question, that makes a clear answer hard, but a few comments to the things you mention in the text:

• tcolorbox is usually safe to use with beamer

• \usepackage{color} is not necessary if you use the beamer document class, it already loads xcolor

• Instead of setting the page colour with

  \pagecolor{page_backgroundcolor}
  

  I suggest to use the beamer way of doing this and use

  \setbeamercolor{background canvas}{bg=page_backgroundcolor}
  

• I would stay well away from tikzposter, it tempts its users to nest tikzpictures, which should better be avoided. Also it nests tikzpictures itself if innerblocks are used.