[wplug] posters with linux?

[Brandon Kuczenski]

> I need to produce posters that illustrate my work for scientific
> meetings. These posters are usually about 48" x 36" (or greater),
...
> limitations on making certain tables within column formatted posters.
>
...
>
> I'm sure that I'm not alone in needing "poster making" software. What
> have other people done?
>

Everyone in my lab -- nay, department -- nay, COLLEGE, it seems -- uses
Powerpoint.  *I* use LaTeX.

This is not to say that I've made a poster yet in LaTeX, but I have made a
slideshow-presentation (I just call them 'powerpoint presentations' so
that people don't get confoosed.)  I have a poster at the Biomechanical
Engineering conference in early October and I was planning to do that in
LaTeX.  It just seems like the "right tool" for the job.

FWIW, I have found that there isn't anything that LaTeX *can't* do -- in
fact, since everything is macros, and since the source code is required to
do anything, it has been my experience that it's easier to trace through
problems and solve them myself than nearly any other open-source endeavor.
Also, the code maturity means that there are basically no bugs, and
contributed software is abundant.  For example, in 'a0poster.cls' the page
sizes are explicitly called out in the first few lines -- it seems like it
should be easy to monkey around with those.  I don't know about your table
problem, though.

That said, it can be pretty frickin hard to do a lot of stuff, like create
new templates.  I've found that starting with an existing .sty or .cls
file and modifying it incrementally has vastly broadened my horizons.

I'd be happy to help you out with this off-list, since it is a problem I
will have to solve in the near future. This would also make me feel better
about being so clueless about linux lately.

As for Scribus.. it looks nice.  You should check it out and tell us if it
*is* nice.  It would certainly beat Oo.o.

-Brandon