LaTEX Booklets and Posters

A5 booklets

1. Add a5paper to the documentclass options. E.g., \documentclass[12pt,a5paper]{article}
2. latex the document (called doc.tex, say)
3. Run dvips -odoc.ps doc.dvi
4. Run psbook <doc.ps >doc2.ps
5. Run psnup -2 <doc2.ps >doc3.ps
6. Run ghostview doc3.ps to check the output.

Posters

• LaTeX Poster Macros, Examples, and Accessories
• Using LaTeX to produce conference posters (Norman Gray)
• Making a poster in LaTeX (Hugh Pumphrey)

A3 posters

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{a3,lscape,multicol}
\makeatletter
\newenvironment{tablehere}
  {\def\@captype{table}}
  {}

\newenvironment{figurehere}
  {\def\@captype{figure}}
  {}
\makeatother

\begin{document}
\begin{landscape}
\begin{multicols}{4}
...
\end{multicols}
\end{landscape}
\end{document}

Try this example file (which uses local postscript files).

A0 posters

• Use xfig - this offers greater flexibility of layout, but text control is cumbersome, so use another package to produce the bulk of the text. Create an a0-sized figure and export at 100% to landscaped a0 postscript (you'll need a new version of xfig - 3.2 at least - to do this). Then run it through the poster program as follows

     poster -ma0 -pa0 -c0% file.ps > newfile.ps
  

  to produce a better postscript.
• Create an a3 poster as above, then use the poster program to magnify to A0 size.

     poster -iA3 -mA0 -pA0 file.ps > newfile.ps
  

  will produce an A0 postscript file that you can send to pjmr1 - see the printing page for information.

     poster -iA3 -mA3 -pA0 -w0% file.ps > newfile.ps
  

  should produce 8 A3 pages which can be assembled to form an A0 page, (but the poster program currently doesn't work as documented) .

  Note that simple scaling like this will leave more space between words than is ideal, but it shouldn't look too bad.

• Use the a0poster class (e.g. start your document with \documentclass[landscape,a0,final]{a0poster}). See the a0poster.sty page for details.
• Tips from Jonathan Carr (with a few changes by Tim Love - note that with xfig.3.2 and beyond some of the work-arounds are unnecessary)

  A newly acquired scanner in the photographic unit of the Engineering department means that slides and negatives can be scanned at 24-bit colour and up to 2700dpi resolution. Images can be saved from within Adobe Photoshop in the TIF format with LZW compression and in IBM format (i.e. NOT the Mac format).

  Care must be taken when using Fetch on the Macintosh to transmit TIF files to UNIX: Binary mode and Raw data must be selected whenever the option arises.

  Xfig can be used to layout a poster at 1:1 scale on the UNIX machines (i.e. the canvas size is about 1 metre width). The latest version of Xfig allows GIF, JPEG, XBM, XPM and EPS images to be imported and displayed. I imported images into Xfig by first converting them to GIF and down sampling them (after lowpass filtering) in XV (this reduced the image file size).

  Some colour correction was employed in Photoshop after scanning the slides, but otherwise no gamma correction was applied in either XV or Photoshop.

  The posters were exported from Xfig as postscript in landscape mode with magnification at 100%. VERY IMPORTANT: edit the postscript file produced by Xfig and comment out the line "n 0 595 m 0 0 l 842 0 l 842 595 l cp clip" - this seems to appear within the first 150 lines of the file (it clips the image to A4). If you exported from Xfig as encapsulated postscript and you use the poster program then the resulting postscript will probably be more conformant than what xfig alone can produce.

  Encapsulation (laminating) at the AVA centre costs 25 pounds but improves the quality of images remarkably, as well as preserving the paper.

  The plotter can print on a continuous roll of paper 90cm in width - so you can make your own wall paper. The plotter is capable of printing on high quality glossy-stiff paper and producing near photo-realistic results - but it costs! We would probably have to supply our own paper (150 pounds for 30m). Encapsulation within the Department is possible but the machine is limited to posters 1m x 0.8m and the result may not be quite as good as the AVA centre (plus they seem to need a one week warning). My posters were relatively simple, more complex designs can be constructed by overlaying images in XFIG. However, beware of the amount of ink which the cheaper paper can absorb - this causes the paper to swell and may result in creases if the paper is encapsulated using the AVA technique.

• Tips from Ed Whittaker (November 1998) (unsure if all these steps are necessary, but it worked)
  • Use xfig to design the poster
  • Make sure that the poster is rotated if necessary so that the postscript is deeper than it is wide.
  • Make sure that the image is offset from the top x-axis by about 40cm but flush to the y-axis.
  • Save .fig file
  • Use "fig2dev-3.2.1" on a research machine (eg. tulip work(ed)), eg.

          fig2dev-3.2.1 -L ps poster.fig poster.eps
    

    (where poster.eps is the output file) NOTE: There should be no need to add a "showpage" at the bottom of this file since we will wrap it up using "poster"...
  • On the teaching system, use "poster", eg.

    poster -c0% -m87x240cm -pa0 -v -w0.5x0.5i poster.eps > poster_final.eps
    

    (-c sets the cutoff; -m sets the dimensions of the final paper output; -w sets the margins [necessary to fiddle with these until the whole image fits neatly on the plotter]) Poster automatically scales the image by certain factors depending on the values given with each switch.
  • Check the image (and borders/margins) with ghostview.
  • Send to plotter's print spool thus: "lp -dpltmr2 -oa0 poster_final.eps"
  • Go and ask the operators to send the file to the plotter.