Frequently Asked Question List for TeX
Formatting
Creating posters with LaTeX
There is no complete “canned solution” to creating a poster (as, for
example, classes like seminar, powerdot and
beamer serve for creating presentations in a variety of
styles).
The nearest approach to the complete solution is the sciposter
class, which provides the means to produce really rather good posters
according to the author’s required style. A complete worked example
is provided with the distribution
Otherwise, there is a range of tools, most of which are based on the
a0poster class, which sets up an appropriately-sized piece of
paper, sets font sizes appropriately, and leaves you to your own
devices.
Having used a0poster, you can of course slog it out, and write
all your poster as an unadorned LaTeX document (presumably in
multiple columns, using the multicol package), but it’s not really
necessary: the (straightforward) textpos package provides a
simple way of positioning chunks of text, or tables or figures, on the
poster page.
More sophisticated is the flowfram package, whose basic aim
in life is flowing text from one box on the page to the next. One of
the package’s design aims seems to have been the production of
posters, and a worked example is provided. The author of
flowfram has an experimental tool called
FlowframTk (formerly called JpgfDraw), which
allows you to construct the outline of frames for use with
flowfram.
The beamerposter package is added to a
beamer document to enable the user to work
as if in a a0poster class. Thus beamer’s neat
provisions for layout may be used when creating the poster.
Documentation of beamerposter is sparse, but an example file
allows the user to get a grip on what’s available.
Despite the relative shortage of tools, there are a fair few web pages
that explain the process (mostly in terms of the a0poster
route):
- from Norman Gray, Producing posters using LaTeX;
- from Nicola Talbot, Creating technical posters with LaTeX
- From Rob Clark Advanced LaTeX Posters (which has links to code samples);
- from Brian Wolven, LaTeX Poster Macros, Examples, and Accessories (Internet Archive) (this page also provides macros and other support suggestions).