This is a collection of words of wisdom on the fraught topic of producing conference posters using LaTeX. It's not bulletproof advice, but should get you started.
This document is still rather rough, and in places maddeningly unspecific. However, on this topic, any advice is better than none. All corrections, amplifictions, and other Words of Wisdom gladly received.
In particular, it's not clear how specific this advice is to our local setup, or how complete it is. If you discover that this advice is or isn't portable, please do let me know, by sending me appropriate edits for this file, in order to help lower world blood-pressure levels, and other night-before-departure angst.
This page is
<http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/docs/posters/>,
$Revision: 1.15 $
[ Glasgow people: there are more specific/local notes in the Astronomy FAQ-o-matic (local access only). ]
Examine the two templates for portrait and landscape posters.
In outline, you use the a0poster
class to handle the page size and fonts for an A0 plotter, and the textpos
package (also at
CTAN) to place text at arbitrary positions on the page. The sequence of
tools is:
% latex my_poster
% dvips my_poster -o myposter.ps
% gv my_poster.ps
Instead of going via Postscript, you can produce your poster using pdflatex
[CT].
This has the advantage that pdflatex can handle several bitmap
formats directly (for example, PNG, GIF, JPEG or TIFF files); this can make a
big difference if you are including bitmaps in your poster. The
latex->dvips route can handle only .eps files, so
bitmaps must be converted to .eps first. However, the encoding of
bitmap files in .eps is typically very inefficient, and results in
huge .eps and .ps files, and this can cause
problems, for example if it causes your printer to run out of memory.
Also, you can view PDF files using Acrobat, gv, or even the Gimp, which may have more flexibility, as well as making it easier to produce A4 previews.
The disadvantage of pdflatex is that it can't handle EPS files directly, so
they have to be converted using epstopdf beforehand.
To view a poster in gv select the 0.100 magnification setting in
gv. Ghostview can examine A0 postscript files, although it does (in
only some versions?) chop a few inches off the far side of the page. If this
happens, you just need to view the poster upside-down or in `seascape'.
If you've used pdflatex (or even if you turn your Postscript to
PDF using ps2pdf), you can view your work using a PDF reader.
Some versions of xdvi have terrible trouble with paper sizes
this large (specifying the paper size with -paper reportedly [?]
helps), so the most reliable way of previewing your poster (if you haven't
generated PDF directly) is probably to produce postcript through dvips and use
gv.
You can get an A4 preview using the draft option on the
a0poster class. You invoke this option using
\documentclass[draft]{a0poster} and this scales the output from A0 to A4.
Note, however, that the graphics and
graphicx packages (which you will probably use to include figures
in your poster) also have a draft option, and if you
include this option on the \documentclass line, it will apply also
to any include packages such as the graphics package. Its effect on
that package is to suppress the display of the figures. If you do want
to see the figures in the drafts (probably the case), then you will need to
unset the draft flag, with either
\usepackage[final]{graphics} if you are using the
graphics package, or
\usepackage[draft=false]{graphicx} if you are using the
variant graphicx package. Note also that, even when you use the draft
option, the postscript file produced by dvips appears as A0 when
viewed in gv. This can be terribly confusing, as it appears that
the draft option has not worked, but it should print out
OK when you send it to the A4 printer. The a0poster documentation
suggests giving the option -Z to dvips if it still
doesn't work.
Alternatively, you might want to avoid using the [draft] option,
or there may be some reason why it is problematic, so you have to rescale the A0
poster instead.
The psresize utility (see below) will resize an A0 poster to A4
so that you can print it on a normal printer. To get the correct rescaling to A4
do:
> psresize -H238cm -h59.5cm foo_a0.ps foo_a4.ps
That's almost it. Unfortunately the resizer seems to offset the poster from
the correct location on the page. Fortunately it's easy to fix. What you have to
do is find the first line like "213.000 0.000 translate" (not
necessarily those numbers exactly) and change it to "0.0 0.0
translate". You should find it just after the "%%Page"
comment.
If you're already using the draft option to
a0poster, then you don't need to resize the postscript file (see
above). If you do, then you can end up with a poster which will fit on a
business card, which can result in you tearing your hair out, and saying an
assortment of things which would make your grandmother blush.
Graeme has written a small perl script which will attempt to the whole
conversion for you, it's called a0toa4.pl.
Just pass it the name of the A0 postscript file:
> dvips my_poster -o This is dvips(k) 5.86 Copyright 1999 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com) ' TeX output 2000.05.11:1612' -> my_poster.ps ... > a0toa4.pl my_poster.ps Wrote a4 version to my_poster_a4.ps
Let us know if it breaks!
Notes:
gv still thinks the paper size is A0. Either change the size
manually to A4 to preview it (printing works fine), or you can edit the
postscript file by changing the bounding box to that appropriate for A4 paper
(see useful
sizes below).
This unfortunately appears to require a certain amount of magic, at least some of which might need to be specific to your printer and your local setup.
Once you have postscript from dvips and you're happy with the results, you can print it to an A0 plotter. However, if you have a landscape poster you need to massage the postscript using a command like the following:
> psnup -w85cm -h119cm -f my_poster_from_dvips.ps \
poster_in_proper_landscape.ps
This command flips the poster through 90 degrees, so that it prints out correctly in lanscape format (otherwise you get a poster in landscape going across the A0 page, and it gets cut off at the edge). It's not quite clear which LaTeX package is to blame for this (it might even be the printer), but do preview the new postscript again before you print it, just to check it's not truncated, especially along the top edge (use "Portrait", "0.100" and "A0" as your options in gv).
When you have the final version ready, proof read it that one last time (see above for how to get an A4 draft version), then send it on its way to the printer in the usual fashion.
If you have to use a print shop to print the thing out -- that is, if you don't have a dirty great A0 plotter to hand -- you should talk to them about what formats they require. They'll probably be able to deal with Postscript (does anyone have general advice about how to make dvips output portable in this respect?), but might have problems with PDF files. If need be [CT], you could read a Postscript or PDF file into the Gimp (which incidentally allows you to do any final touching-up you fancy) and save it as a TIFF. The resulting file will be huge, but is a very well-supported standard format, and a print shop will almost certainly be able to handle it.
Another way to print the poster out is to split it into smaller (A4 or A3)
sections, print them out, and reassemble them by hand. To split the poster up,
you can use epssplit
(that page includes pointers to some other useful utilities).
ftp://ftp.es.ele.tue.nl/pub/users/jos/poster/,
which resizes a single-page image to poster size, or splits up a larger page
so that it can be printed on A4 sheets. This reportedly [JL]
works well and (unlike epssplit)
handles postscript as well as encapsulated postscript.
http://klimt.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/~hscharr/Seiten/Poster/posterfaq.html
http://www.physik.uni-marburg.de/kosy/AGKoSy/poster/
respectively. However, both these resources seem to have disappeared. Does
anyone know where they are?
psresize and psnup are part of a suite of tools
for editing postscript, called psutils.
textpos. The paper sizes here are from Markus Kuhn's excellent page on ISO/International Paper Sizes.
| A0 paper | 841 × 1189 mm |
| A4 paper | 210 × 297 mm |
| 1 metre | 39.37in |
| = | 2834 points |
| 1 inch | 72 (postscript) points |
| = | 25.4mm |
| A0 bounding box -- portrait | 0 0 2383 3370 |
| A0 bounding box -- landscape | 0 0 3370 2383 |
| A4 bounding box -- portrait | 0 0 595 841 |
| A4 bounding box -- landscape | 0 0 841 595 |
Folk who have contributed comments:
<carl@reynolds.ph.man.ac.uk>
<moz@compsoc.man.ac.uk>
$Log: posters.html,v $ Revision 1.15 2003/02/28 15:44:06 norman Removed broken links to Hanno Scharr and Oliver Sieks pages. Revision 1.14 2002/12/03 12:15:00 norman Added a mention of the epssplit utility, and pointers to other templates Revision 1.13 2002/08/20 14:42:01 norman Comments about the (non-)interaction between [draft] and gv. Revision 1.12 2002/08/20 10:45:54 norman Comments about a0poster's draft mode, and the interaction with graphics draft mode. Revision 1.11 2002/05/14 09:54:49 norman Expanded comments on pdflatex Revision 1.10 2001/11/07 11:05:35 norman Added a note about the success of the `poster' application Revision 1.9 2001/08/27 10:05:24 norman Noted that xdvi's -paper option helps it display large sizes OK. Revision 1.8 2001/08/21 16:53:27 norman Tidied up the table of paper sizes Revision 1.7 2001/08/21 16:36:18 norman Added advice from Carl Tipton, on using pdflatex as an alternative route. Revision 1.6 2001/07/05 12:57:51 norman Corrected typo in URL Revision 1.5 2001/07/02 17:36:31 norman Slightly recast the introduction, so that the pointer to local-only advice isn't first. Revision 1.4 2001/07/02 17:22:53 norman Minor typos. Correcting references to sample files.