26/10/2008 Producing posters using LaTeX

Using LaTeX to produce conference

posters
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 in places maddeningly unspecific.

However, on this topic, any advice is better than none.
Please do send me any corrections, amplifictions, and
other Words of Wisdom: help keep down world blood-
pressure, and eliminate other night-before-departure
angst.

Persistent URL: http://purl.org/nxg/note/posters

$Revision: 1.23 $,

§ 1 Getting Started § 2 Previewing ( § 2.1 On screen; § 2.2 Draft

mode; § 2.3 psresize; § 2.4 a0toa4.pl; ) § 3 Printing the Beast (§
3.1 Printing onto multiple sheets; ) § 4 Other resources ( § 4.1
Useful sizes; ) § 5 Contributors § 6 Document history

1 Getting Started
Examine the two templates for portrait and landscape
posters.

In outline, you use the a0poster class (browse, zip) to

handle the page size and fonts for an A0 plotter, and the
textpos package (browse, zip)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.

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The only, slight, disadvantage of pdflatex is that it can't

handle EPS files directly, so they have to be converted
using epstopdf beforehand.

If you're likely to be switching between latex and

pdflatex, remember that, with the graphicx package, the
command \includegraphics{file} will cause latex to
search for file.eps, and pdflatex search for first
file.pdf (or other appropriate file extensions). Thus if you
have both file.eps and file.pdf (say) in your directory,
then both latex and pdflatex should Just Work.

2 Previewing
2.1 On To view a poster in gv select the 0.100 magnification
screen 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.

2.2 Draft You can get an A4 preview using the draft option on the
mode 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
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26/10/2008 Producing posters using LaTeX
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.

2.3 Alternatively, you might want to avoid using the [draft]

psresize 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.

2.4 Graeme has written a small perl script which will attempt to
a0toa4.pl 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.radicale
' 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:

1. 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).
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3 Printing the Beast

Printing an oversize document often appears to require a
certain amount of magic, at least some of which might
need to be specific to your printer, your local setup,
software versions, and the current phase of the moon.

In general, try to produce your output in as few steps as

possible, since each step gives gremlins the opportunity to
add offsets, flips, crops and so on, into your poster.

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).

If you have to convert postscript to PDF at some point,

there's more than one tool that can help. If ps2pdf has
problems, then ImageMagick might be able to help[ST],
with the command convert poster.ps poster.pdf. And
vice versa; this is true even though the two tools both use
Ghostscript internally.

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
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26/10/2008 Producing posters using LaTeX
3.1 Printing Another way to print the poster out is to split it into smaller
onto (A4 or A3) sections, print them out, and reassemble them
multiple by hand. To split the poster up, you can use epssplit (that
sheets page includes pointers to some other useful utilities),
though this handles only Encapsulated Postscript.

Alternatively, there is a tool called `poster', which is

available at
ftp://ftp.es.ele.tue.nl/pub/users/jos/poster/. This

resizes a single-page image to poster size, or splits up a

larger page so that it can be printed on A4 sheets. This
works well, in my own and others' [JL] experience, and
moreover works with printing-postscript as well as
encapsulated postscript. For example, the command
poster -iA1 -mA4 -pA1 poster.ps takes an input A1
poster and produces an output A1 poster on 8 A4 sheets,
including useful crop marks. When I had to use this (advice:
when you go to a conference, take your poster with you), I
had a lot of trouble with included EPS graphics, which
largely went away when I normalised the EPS files with the
eps2eps utility which is part of the Ghostscript distribution.

I'm not aware of any tools which do the same splitting trick
with PDF (can anyone point to such a tool?).

4 Other resources
psresize and psnup are part of a suite of tools for
editing postscript, called psutils.
There are other poster templates at Edinburgh,
Oxford and Basel. In some cases, I feel the job might
have been made easier by using textpos.
As mentioned above, the ImageMagick suite
includes several tools for converting between image
formats.

4.1 Useful The paper sizes here are from Markus Kuhn's excellent
sizes page on ISO/International Paper Sizes.

A0 paper 841 x 1189 mm

A1 paper 594 x 841 mm
A4 paper 210 x 297 mm
1 metre 39.37in
= 2834 points
1 inch 72.27 points (traditional)
= 72 (postscript) points
= 25.4mm (by definition)
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

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26/10/2008 Producing posters using LaTeX
Folk who have contributed comments:

[CT] Carl Tipton

[JL] John Levon
[ST] Sirirat Traiviratana
[?] Arghh, I've lost the note which suggested this

6 Document history
$Log: index.xml,v $
Revision 1.23 2007/09/10 07:30:35 norman
Add link to another poster template
New document structure conventions

Revision 1.22 2007/02/16 10:20:52 norman

Language tweaks, and fixed links

Revision 1.21 2007/02/16 10:13:04 norman

Added note about ImageMagick

Revision 1.20 2006/09/15 21:21:40 norman

Fix link typo

Revision 1.19 2006/07/03 18:05:30 norman

Add notes about includegraphics, the `poster' and `epssplit' tools,
and some paper sizes.

Revision 1.18 2006/04/03 15:14:03 norman

Fix homepage links

Revision 1.17 2005/07/23 23:31:27 norman

Changed the (persistent) URL of this page to purl.org/nxg/note/posters

Revision 1.16 2005/04/02 17:12:09 norman

Reformatting; fixed URL of GS's homepage; minor rewordings.
Nothing substantial.

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.

Norman Gray
Graeme Stewart
2007/09/10 07:30:35

Copyright 2001-3, 2005-7, Norman Gray and Graeme Stewart

http://nxg.me.uk/docs/posters/ 6/6