I produced two posters using Latex last year. I found the following website which has a very nice and easy to use/alter template
http://www2.lut.fi/~jkamarai/misc/poster/latexhelp.html
In unix it was really easy to compile because they include a Makefile to do all of the hard work for you. I'm not sure how well that would work from windows though. I have attached my .tex file if anybody wants to compare it to the website version and see what bits I needed to change to alter the size of the poster,location of the boxes, colour, font etc. (although they wont be able to compile it without my images).
Hope this helps Stuart
Advice from Mary in 2007
5 months late, I have the basic knowledge for producing an A0 size poster and printing it out on the university network. (I failed to do this in time for the ICM in August 2006.) This is intended for the second year Liverpool Ph D students who have to produce posters for the Poster day on Wednesday 14 March 2007, a supplement to the poster workshop on 19 February run by CSD.
It seems to be essential to use pdflatex, not latex. When I tried to do a poster in August 2006, the printer misinterpreted the .ps files sent to it, even when the view in ghostview was correct. Postscipt files which viewed correctly in ghostview would not convert correctly to .pdf format. The file sent to the printer with pdflatex is of course a pdf . What you see in the .pdf preview is what you get.
This means that diagrams cannot be in .eps format, but virtually anything else will do, including .pdf and .jpg . (I myself converted to .pdf from .eps and .mp These can be done on unix, for example, using epstopdf and mptopdf )
I recommend viewing any poster at 100 per cent magnification and taking a tape measure to it before finally sending to the printer, if you use the same packages as I did. The clever a0poster has a mind of its own and seems to scale sizes down, possibly if it can fit the poster into a smaller size such as A2. If this happens, the answer seems to be to scale measurements up. Hopefully you will see what I mean from the example I have produced below.
I used a0poster and textpos . These can be obtained from
a0poster and
textpos also uses everyshi from
Out of these packages, the only absolutely necessary inputs were four small files. It seems to be legal for me to include them here for downloading, so I will.
Norman Gray, the inventor of Textpos, produced a useful 8-page instruction manual. It can be downloaded here -- or from the textpos link given above. textpos.pdf
Here is a poster I produced just now, just for a template. postertemplate.tex
Here is the poster I failed to produce in time for ICM06
and the .pdf version:
The width measurements are between between 10 and 20 per cent less than what I have specified. If I increase the size the reduction proportion persists. Any explanations are welcome, but it does not really matter.
Here are two more links, the first on the page in google when I tried recently.
Anyone is welcome to send me further information and links, and I shall try to add them in.