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Colloque Numérique Suisse / Schweizer Numerik Kolloquium

April 25, 2008

Université de Fribourg, Campus Pérolles
 

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Instructions for typesetting a poster

This is a Beginner's Guide to A0 poster typesetting in LaTeX. The presented advice is only indicative, no formal style has been imposed for the Colloquium posters. However, we prefer A0 formats in "portrait" orientation.

Downloads

Preliminaries

The suggested tool is LaTeX. If you want to typeset your poster with another tool, you should be careful with the image resolutions and the size of the resulting PDF file (it should be kept under 20MB).

Image resolution should be not too coarse (the image appears blurred or pixelized on the A0 format) and not too fine (to generate large PDF files for printing). Caution should be taken with genuine vector-images like Encapsulated PostScript (.eps) or PDF files. Their size might be unnecessarily large as it might contain also hidden data (3D information in Z-buffer, or other images).

Do not hesitate to contact us at colloqnum08@unifr.ch for additional information and help with printing.

Preparing conference posters in LaTeX

For the A0 poster creation, we will use the a0size and the sciposter LaTeX classes. These classes may already be installed on your computer. They are also provided with the poster template (see the download section), in this case you have to copy them into your current LaTeX source directory. Other LaTeX resources are available at CTAN.

All you need is

A working LaTeX installation.

All you need to do is

  • downlad the template,
  • complete the LaTeX source file poster.tex,
  • compile it with pdflatex, or latex.

The only file you have to modify is the file poster.tex.

If you compile it with pdflatex, you will be able to include bitmap figures (PNG, BMP and JPG) and PDF files by using the class graphicx (\usepackage{graphicx} at the beginning of the document and e.g. \includegraphics[width=10.5cm]{./figure.png} in the document body). For this option, it is not possible to include EPS or PS figures.

If you compile poster.tex with latex, you will be able to include only EPS and PS figures using the same class graphicx. (The template poster.tex already contains an image, see how it is included).

We suggest you use pdflatex to compile your poster, as we are 100% sure that it produces nice looking posters that can be easily printed on plotters.

An important issue: Image resolution

A 150 dpi resolution is a good tradeoff between image size (KB) and image quality. A good rule of thumb is to have a picture which is twice as big as the final result you want to have. For example if you want to have a 10 by 10 centimeters bitmap figure on your poster, you should have on your screen a 20 by 20 centimeters.

Previewing your poster

You can preview your poster with any PDF reader. For printing a test copy on A4 paper, define the paper-size to A4 and then use the "fit to page" command in your PDF viewer.

Problems with typesetting or printing

Contact us at colloqnum08@unifr.ch