Matthew's Journal

I've done a couple of posters in LaTeX: there are quite a lot of template files out there (googling for 'Latex poster style file' should get you them). It's OK provided you don't want to do anything particularly fancy -- eg. there didn't appear to be any way of putting in a background image which was either elegant or didn't produce ugly results. I'd recommend it if you're doing a poster with lots of equations on (although arguably posters shouldn't have lots of equations on!) or you just want writing and figures.

NB. I'd check what format the printers will take, particularly before choosing a 'none of the above' option -- in my case they'd only take powerpoint or PDF. Previously I found this out rather late and converting A0 postscript to acceptable A0 PDF turned out to take longer than I thought -- the same may apply to other formats.

What you're doing is desktop publishing, in the strict sense of the word, so a slide-design (Powerpoint) or a book-typesetting (TeX) package is not what you want.

I think this is an opportunity to find a place where you can use the licensed copy of InDesign, QuarkXpress or Illustrator that I'm sure the university has access to, or to use Scribus or maybe even Inkscape from the free-software world (I don't know how Inkscape is at handling formatted text boxes); or, I suspect, to use Word.

http://www.plokta.com/plokta/issue26/issue26.pdf is done in Word, which gives some idea of what's possible ... if the large page sizes are an issue you could presumably design in 4-point type on A4, I know that the large-format plotter we had at work needed to be fed with A4-size images with ridiculously small text and plotted them on A0 scaled up by a factor four in each direction.

I've had a play with oowriter, which I cannot recommend for this because it seems to do lots of positioning off the top of its head without paying the slightest attention to where I've dragged the positioning and sizing bars of the frames I've been inserting.

if you want the LaTeX file i used to create posters when i still thought i had any hopes of making it as an academic, do shout. but if you don't shout this evening, it'll be monday before i can realistically do anything, as i shall be in oxford from early tomorrow morning until then.

-m-

I've made posters in LaTeX and in Inkscape. I definitely recommend the latter. If you're running OS X though, you could make your poster in either Keynote or OmniGraffle. The nicest posters at the conferences I go to always seem to be done in either Keynote or OmniGraffle.

Our group tends to use Illustrator for posters, though it had a fairly uninituitive interface that left me screaming at it.

Personally I'd use RISC OS Draw (or Artworks if I owned a copy), but then I'm like that...

If you go down the LaTeX route, you may find bits of the CUED help pages useful.

Top tip: if you use anything that allows you to embed postscript graphics, run the original postscript files through psclean (basically anything that calls ghostscript with the pswrite driver) before embedding them. If there's anything worse than finding that a bit of rogue matlab output has changed the global transformation matrix half way through a document, it's finding it when that document is being printed on an A0 printer at #25 a sheet ...

I guess it depends on your level aversion to piracy. If you find you have a parrot on your shoulder then get a big commercial graphics/DTP package like Illustrator. MS Visio is quite good for diagrammey things too. There might be cheap alternatives out there possibly. Otherwise Word is reasonable for this sort of thing ish and probably you won't need to grow a wooden leg or hook hand. I wouldn't use powerpoint it is too chunky and imprecise for this.

Years and years ago I had to do some diagrams or something at a company and there was no graphics software and Word was shite then so I used Excel - set the cell size to be small and use that as a grid. I drew a diagram representing beer being bottled at Becks brewery in Bremen yay.