[wplug] posters with linux?

[John Harrold]

Sometime in September Doug Green assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| Hi all-
| 
| I need to produce posters that illustrate my work for scientific 
| meetings. These posters are usually about 48" x 36" (or greater), 
| output with a large-format printer. In the past I have used MS 
| Powerpoint, resized a "slide" to meet my specs, and incorporated text 
| boxes and illustrations as needed. It's a sloppy process since 
| powerpoint really wasn't made for poster creation. Text is sub-optimal, 
| figures are frequently not aligned, and images are always poor. I then 
| used a package for LaTeX, which gave beautiful text, but required way 
| WAY too much effort. It's also not optimal for a number of other 
| reasons... for example, you're limited to standard page sizes (such as 
| a0poster), it's a lot of work to make a new template, and there a big 
| limitations on making certain tables within column formatted posters.

It's not the most obvious thing, but you can do custom paper sizes in LaTeX
using the a0poster class. From asking questions [1], I found that the a0poster
class file is basically used to make the fonts huge. The geometry package
should work for setting page dimensions:

\usepackage[dvips,
            paperheight=48in,
            paperwidth=36in]{geometry}


| I found this package called "Scribus" (see: http://www.scribus.org.uk/  
| ) which claims to be an open source DTP (desktop publishing) app for 
| Linux. Has anyone used this, or have any info about it? Could this be a 
| solution to oversize printing needs??

After hearing about scribus on slashdot, I tried this using the version of
scribus that comes with debian testing. Now it may be that particular version,
but it was a little flakey and it crashed a bit. I didnt actually try to make
anything of substance --- I mainly just poked around. I just tried to start it
up and it just hangs there.

I know this might not be an important issue for some, but for me to be able to
use scribus, it would have to have make equations look really purty. I'm fairly
confident that scribus has solved my main issue with power point which is print
quality. That is why I tend to turn to LaTeX because the printed quality of the
documents is awesome.

[1] http://tinyurl.com/5xfwo

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