A0 poster with latex

I had to make an A0 poster for a conference. As I had my source in LaTeX, I tried for the first time to do it with latex. It worked better than I thought.

First, at UGent, one can print the poster with http://www.elis.ugent.be/nl/designjet

Second, a latex base file using columns and posterboxes, is at http://www.sgeier.net/poster/. I had to change it a bit to get it working ok though: remove some /hfill and /vfill calls, add some \mbox{\ } as needed.

Note that in Europe, you would want to create an A3 example, then scale it by 2.8 to obtain an A0 poster. So you need the following width and height in the tex:

\def\layoutwidth{297mm} % A3 portrait, A0 when scaled 2.82
\def\layoutheight{420mm}
\def\numcolumns{3}

The above produces a bad dvi file when compiled with LaTeX though, you need to run the command

dvips -Ppdf -G0 -o poster.ps poster

to obtain a nice ps file okular can nicely show. You can then print this to an A3 printer with good results.

Third step is to scale it to A0 poster. You need the poster_resize script for this:

csh poster_resize poster.ps 2.8

This creates a poster.resize.ps file which is an A0 print. If you do not have csh, sudo apt-get install it!

Fourth step is to create a backup: split the A0 poster in 16 A4 sheets you can plot on a colour printer and glue together yourself:

poster -iA0 -mA4 -pA0 poster.resize.ps > posterA4.ps

That is it. If you do not have the poster program, it should be available in your package manager (sudo apt-get install poster).