Software for poster presentations

[Stuart Prescott-6]

Hi All,

As a brief respite from packaging discussions, here's a user question:

What software would you use or recommend for preparing a poster for
presentation at a conference? [0]

A few things come to mind straight off -- perhaps existing users can make
comments on these things:

* openoffice impress or draw: I guess these would be the same as doing a
poster in powerpoint, with the same limitations. Does it work OK?

* inkscape: can it handle flowing and editing text nicely? I've only ever used
it for drawing. I see it's debtagged as "works-with-format::tex" which I find
intriguing but don't know what that means in practice. I know it has
bugs/limitations in being able to compress jpeg images which could result in
an obscenely large PDF export when it comes to producing the final product.

* scribus: I've never used it but by its description it sounds like a good
tool for the job; I've heard it's a bit quirky but that it's a good program
for this sort of thing.

* LyX: is it even possible without fighting it every step of the way?

* latex (directly): as for lyx, it would of course be possible, but is it
sensible to do so? [1]

thoughts? comments? suggestions?

thanks, in advance

Stuart


[0] For those who don't know what I mean, it is common at scientific
conferences for a large number of attendees to "present" a poster on their
work rather than speaking about it in a seminar. The A0-sized posters are put
up around a room, people wander about reading bits of them and the presenters
stand near their poster to field questions. Beer and wine frequently flow.
Posters tend to be quite visual with diagrams, schematics, photos, reaction
mechanisms etc and some text to explain what's going on.

[1] I frequently ask the same question when making presentations in latex with
latex-beamer... if my presentations were all text, beamer would be fantastic
for it, but since they tend to be all graphics, I find myself spending hours
fiddling with diagrams in tikz and wonder if this really is the right tool
for the job.



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[LaserJock]

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 3:13 PM, Stuart Prescott <debian-expires2007@...> wrote:

Hi All,

As a brief respite from packaging discussions, here's a user question:

What software would you use or recommend for preparing a poster for
presentation at a conference? [0]

A few things come to mind straight off -- perhaps existing users can make
comments on these things:

* openoffice impress or draw: I guess these would be the same as doing a
poster in powerpoint, with the same limitations. Does it work OK?

I've had labmates go the PowerPoint way. I think the biggest issue has been pixelated graphics. If you can get good resolution graphics then it's not too bad.
 

* inkscape: can it handle flowing and editing text nicely? I've only ever used
it for drawing. I see it's debtagged as "works-with-format::tex" which I find
intriguing but don't know what that means in practice. I know it has
bugs/limitations in being able to compress jpeg images which could result in
an obscenely large PDF export when it comes to producing the final product.

I use inkscape to great figures for posters and papers, but I've not tried to do the whole poster that way. I think it would be a bit limited in terms of layout.

* scribus: I've never used it but by its description it sounds like a good
tool for the job; I've heard it's a bit quirky but that it's a good program
for this sort of thing.

This is what I used for my last poster. It gives some pretty good results. Layout is pretty easy and it will definitely get the job done. It is quirky though and it took me a bit to figure out how to do things.
 

* latex (directly): as for lyx, it would of course be possible, but is it
sensible to do so? [1]

I've also done posters in the past using plain-old latex. It took me *forever* to do it though. The results were great of course (equations look great) but for me personally not worth the time.

-Jordan

[Miguel de Val Borro-2]

Hi Stuart

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 11:13:03PM +0100, Stuart Prescott wrote:
> * latex (directly): as for lyx, it would of course be possible, but is it
> sensible to do so? [1]

The Latex sciposter class to make scientific posters does the work
very well.  It is included in the texlive-science package in Debian
testing. There are other packages in CTAN to make posters that may also
be in Debian.

Miguel


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[Carlo Segre]

On Sun, 18 May 2008, Stuart Prescott wrote:

> * openoffice impress or draw: I guess these would be the same as doing a
> poster in powerpoint, with the same limitations. Does it work OK?

We mostly use this simply because our collaborators use powerpoint and
this will do a pretty good job with that format.  The biggest annoyance is
that when we use it natively, we still can't use EPS figures and thus are
limited by the pixellation in JPG or PNG formats.

>
> [1] I frequently ask the same question when making presentations in latex with
> latex-beamer... if my presentations were all text, beamer would be fantastic
> for it, but since they tend to be all graphics, I find myself spending hours
> fiddling with diagrams in tikz and wonder if this really is the right tool
> for the job.
>

LyX works pretty well for presentations.  I like it particularly because
it handles EPS nicely and equations (for course lectures) come out nicely.

Cheers,

Carlo

--
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Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College
Illinois Institute of Technology
Voice: 312.567.3498            Fax: [phone]
segre@...   http://www.iit.edu/~segre   segre@...


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[George Serbanut]

Hi Stuart,

For poster presentation and not for slides, try GIMP. For diagrams, I suggest you DIA. For plotting, I am sure you are familiar with PAW/ROOT (used especially in high energy physics and nuclear physics), or GNUplot or VTK if your field is more connected with math/engineering/computing.

I hope you will find GIMP and DIA satisfactory for your needs.

Good luck and have fun!
George

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 1:13 AM, Stuart Prescott <debian-expires2007@...> wrote:

Hi All,

As a brief respite from packaging discussions, here's a user question:

What software would you use or recommend for preparing a poster for
presentation at a conference? [0]

A few things come to mind straight off -- perhaps existing users can make
comments on these things:

* openoffice impress or draw: I guess these would be the same as doing a
poster in powerpoint, with the same limitations. Does it work OK?

* inkscape: can it handle flowing and editing text nicely? I've only ever used
it for drawing. I see it's debtagged as "works-with-format::tex" which I find
intriguing but don't know what that means in practice. I know it has
bugs/limitations in being able to compress jpeg images which could result in
an obscenely large PDF export when it comes to producing the final product.

* scribus: I've never used it but by its description it sounds like a good
tool for the job; I've heard it's a bit quirky but that it's a good program
for this sort of thing.

* LyX: is it even possible without fighting it every step of the way?

* latex (directly): as for lyx, it would of course be possible, but is it
sensible to do so? [1]

thoughts? comments? suggestions?

thanks, in advance

Stuart


[0] For those who don't know what I mean, it is common at scientific
conferences for a large number of attendees to "present" a poster on their
work rather than speaking about it in a seminar. The A0-sized posters are put
up around a room, people wander about reading bits of them and the presenters
stand near their poster to field questions. Beer and wine frequently flow.
Posters tend to be quite visual with diagrams, schematics, photos, reaction
mechanisms etc and some text to explain what's going on.

[1] I frequently ask the same question when making presentations in latex with
latex-beamer... if my presentations were all text, beamer would be fantastic
for it, but since they tend to be all graphics, I find myself spending hours
fiddling with diagrams in tikz and wonder if this really is the right tool
for the job.



--
Stuart Prescott                 www.nanoNANOnano.net


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[smr99]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 05:16:48AM +0300, George Serbanut wrote:
> Hi Stuart,
>
> For poster presentation and not for slides, try GIMP. For diagrams, I
> suggest you DIA. For plotting, I am sure you are familiar with PAW/ROOT
> (used especially in high energy physics and nuclear physics), or GNUplot or
> VTK if your field is more connected with math/engineering/computing.
>
> I hope you will find GIMP and DIA satisfactory for your needs.

I just discovered this week that dia doesn't allow you to rotate text
in the diagram.  Not even by 90 degrees!

If rotation or high-quality text is important, you can try Ipe which
uses LaTeX to render text.  Thus you can annotate your figure with
beautiful text including mathematics, should you wish.

Regards,
-Steve

[Michael Hanke]

Hi,

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 11:13:03PM +0100, Stuart Prescott wrote:

>
> Hi All,
>
> As a brief respite from packaging discussions, here's a user question:
>
> What software would you use or recommend for preparing a poster for
> presentation at a conference? [0]
>
> A few things come to mind straight off -- perhaps existing users can make
> comments on these things:
>
> * openoffice impress or draw: I guess these would be the same as doing a
> poster in powerpoint, with the same limitations. Does it work OK?
>
> * inkscape: can it handle flowing and editing text nicely? I've only ever used
> it for drawing. I see it's debtagged as "works-with-format::tex" which I find
> intriguing but don't know what that means in practice. I know it has
> bugs/limitations in being able to compress jpeg images which could result in
> an obscenely large PDF export when it comes to producing the final product.
>
> * scribus: I've never used it but by its description it sounds like a good
> tool for the job; I've heard it's a bit quirky but that it's a good program
> for this sort of thing.

Over the last years I have tried to use all of the above to prepare
posters. I have to say that inkscape is by far the best.

It is true that it is quite bad with text editing, but usually you do
not want much text on a poster and inkscape indirectly helps with it ;)
However, for the last poster I needed syntax highlighted code (which
would be a PITA to do with inkscape), but since 0.46 you can import PDF
files. So I used the PDF of some latex-beamer slides and imported the
Latex-rendered code (which obviously also works for plain text).

Moreover, working with SVG as the base format it is quite easy to put
the poster in version control and work together with several people.

Additonally inkscape can import almost all reasonable formats, so you
are free to use dia or xfig for plot. However, since I do most data
analysis in Python I can really recommend matplotlib for plot which is
able to export directly to SVG.


HTH,

Michael


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[Stuart Prescott-6]

Today, "A.E.Lawrence" <A.E.Lawrence@........> wrote:

> As of today, I can't imagine why anyone would use anything but LaTeX for
> scientific purposes, at least in any quantitative science. The only
> exception might be when accessibility was of overriding importance -
> then something based around MathML and friends might be sensible,
> perhaps also via a suitable LaTex package. GIMP, inkscape and more can
> be used to prepare images that can then be handed to LaTeX.

I agree with your sentiments about latex being quite useful; indeed, it is the
only thing that I currently use for writing up my work.

But I'm talking about a poster here not a paper. A poster is an entirely
visual thing where you do the layout; latex is an entirely text-based thing
where the TeX typesetting engine does the hard work and does the layout for
you. These two things seem to be at the opposite ends of the scale hence my
question about whether latex would be a viable alternative.

Have you ever used latex to produce a poster? Care to share the latex code
(and final product)? Learning by example is always easiest!

> I have heard of conferences which don't know how to accept LaTeX: just
> say no and submit elsewhere :-)

The question of not accepting LaTeX is orthogonal to this discussion; the
presenter of a poster turns up with a printed out posted and sticks it up on
the poster board. The conference organisers never even know what software you
used to prepare the poster.

cheers
Stuart

--
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[Thomas Weber-2]

Am Montag, den 19.05.2008, 12:05 +0100 schrieb Stuart Prescott:
> Today, "A.E.Lawrence" <A.E.Lawrence@........> wrote:
> Have you ever used latex to produce a poster?

Yes.

> Care to share the latex code (and final product)? Learning by example is always easiest!

I have to dig through my stuff for the .tex files, but the result can be
seen on
http://www.num.uni-sb.de/iam/veroeffentlichungen/downloads/poster_fully3d_2007.pdf

Posting the files to the mailing list is probably not an option, some of
the images were pretty huge.

        Thomas


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[Don Armstrong]

On Mon, 19 May 2008, Stuart Prescott wrote:
> Have you ever used latex to produce a poster? Care to share the
> latex code (and final product)? Learning by example is always
> easiest!

Yes; you can see an example here:

http://rzlab.ucr.edu/debian/focis_poster_2007.tar.gz


Don Armstrong

--
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I can't remember starting, and I'm never done.
 -- a softer world #221
    http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=221

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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[Miguel de Val Borro-2]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 12:05:31PM +0100, Stuart Prescott wrote:

> I agree with your sentiments about latex being quite useful; indeed, it is the
> only thing that I currently use for writing up my work.
>
> But I'm talking about a poster here not a paper. A poster is an entirely
> visual thing where you do the layout; latex is an entirely text-based thing
> where the TeX typesetting engine does the hard work and does the layout for
> you. These two things seem to be at the opposite ends of the scale hence my
> question about whether latex would be a viable alternative.
>
> Have you ever used latex to produce a poster? Care to share the latex code
> (and final product)? Learning by example is always easiest!

There is an example of a latex poster in the texlive-science-doc package at:
/usr/share/doc/texlive-science-doc/latex/sciposter/sciposterexample/

Miguel


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[Thomas Weber-8]

Am Montag, den 19.05.2008, 13:31 +0100 schrieb Don Armstrong:
> On Mon, 19 May 2008, Stuart Prescott wrote:
> > Have you ever used latex to produce a poster? Care to share the
> > latex code (and final product)? Learning by example is always
> > easiest!
>
> Yes; you can see an example here:
>
> http://rzlab.ucr.edu/debian/focis_poster_2007.tar.gz

Is there a reason you don't include the .png graphics directly, but
convert them to .pdf before?

        Thomas


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[Don Armstrong]

On Mon, 19 May 2008, Thomas Weber wrote:

> Am Montag, den 19.05.2008, 13:31 +0100 schrieb Don Armstrong:
> > On Mon, 19 May 2008, Stuart Prescott wrote:
> > > Have you ever used latex to produce a poster? Care to share the
> > > latex code (and final product)? Learning by example is always
> > > easiest!
> >
> > Yes; you can see an example here:
> >
> > http://rzlab.ucr.edu/debian/focis_poster_2007.tar.gz
>
> Is there a reason you don't include the .png graphics directly, but
> convert them to .pdf before?

Alpha channel support is the primary reason. [This may have been fixed
in pdflatex, but it wasn't the last time I checked.]


Don Armstrong

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But if I did...
It would be you.
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http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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[Kevin B. McCarty-3]

Hi Stuart,

Stuart Prescott wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> As a brief respite from packaging discussions, here's a user question:
>
> What software would you use or recommend for preparing a poster for
> presentation at a conference? [0]
>
> A few things come to mind straight off -- perhaps existing users can make
> comments on these things:
>
> * openoffice impress or draw: I guess these would be the same as doing a
> poster in powerpoint, with the same limitations. Does it work OK?

I've made a poster this way (with Impress), and it works as well as can
be expected (i.e. no worse than Powerpoint).  From memory, there are two
major limitations:

- If you have a very large poster, I think Impress has some arbitrary
limit (how stupid!) on the maximum size to which you can set the custom
page.  I guess this can be worked around by creating a smaller custom
page with the same aspect ratio, and then asking whatever print shop you
use to expand it to the desired size when put to hard copy.

- I had serious problems getting Impress to do something sensible when
importing colleagues' posters that were created with the Windows version
of Powerpoint.  Somehow it screws up importing objects created in
Microsoft's equivalent to Draw (forget the name).  For what it's worth,
the Mac OS X version of Powerpoint had exactly the same import problem
with these files (ah, Microsoft software, not even compatible with itself!)

best regards,

--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@...>
WWW: http://www.starplot.org/
WWW: http://people.debian.org/~kmccarty/
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751

[Oleksandr Moskalenko-2]

* Stuart Prescott <debian-expires2007@...> [2008-05-18 23:13:03 +0100]:

> Hi All,
>
> As a brief respite from packaging discussions, here's a user question:
>
> What software would you use or recommend for preparing a poster for
> presentation at a conference? [0]
>
> * scribus: I've never used it but by its description it sounds like a good
> tool for the job; I've heard it's a bit quirky but that it's a good program
> for this sort of thing.

I've done all my scientific conference posters in Scribus for more then 4
years now. I've yet to run into any quirks as far as poster preparation is
concerned. Poster preparation is probably one of the simplest use cases for
Scribus, so I'd be really surprised if you would really run into any problems.
By the way, printing these posters is easy as all print shops can print the
excellent PDFs Scribus produces.

Regards,

Alex.


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[Eric S Fraga]

I've used a number of methods (xfig, impress, powerpoint, LaTeX
slides, LaTeX sciposter/a0poster) to create A0 or A1 size posters for
conferences over the years.  I have settled on LaTeX with the
sciposter class as the best (for my needs/uses).  Very easy to use and
excellent results are obtained. You can either flow your text, figures
and tables using multicols or you can use the textpos package to place
items (text boxes, figures, tables) directly at any point on the
canvas.

I find LaTeX not only much higher quality than all the other options
but also so much easier to use as I don't have to worry about most of
the formatting.

In case you cannot print to A0 or A1 directly, by the way, look at the
"poster" package in Debian -- I sometimes (to save money) print off a
poster generated using sciposter onto a number of A4 sheets, laminate
these and then stick them together when I put the poster up.  Not as
impressive/professional but useful for some conferences.  

> [1] I frequently ask the same question when making presentations in latex with
> latex-beamer... if my presentations were all text, beamer would be fantastic
> for it, but since they tend to be all graphics, I find myself spending hours
> fiddling with diagrams in tikz and wonder if this really is the right tool
> for the job.

At engineering conferences (as opposed to maths conferences where many
if not most speakers use LaTeX), given the frequent comments/questions
along the lines of "How did you generate such great looking figures"
when I've given talks based on tikz, I would suggest that the effort
is worth it.  Although tikz has a steep learning curve (the manual,
although comprehensive, can be difficult to navigate...), once you get
the hang of it, it's actually quite easy to churn out all kinds of
incredibly impressive (and very professional looking) diagrams.

I must say that tikz constantly amazes me: the package is an
incredible piece of coding.  I'm still learning it...

All of this reminds me to get back to working on my poster for next
week's conference! :-)


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