Re: Software for poster presentations

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

I've used a number of methods (xfig, impress, powerpoint, LaTeX
slides, LaTeX sciposter/a0poster) to create A0 or A1 size posters for
conferences over the years.  I have settled on LaTeX with the
sciposter class as the best (for my needs/uses).  Very easy to use and
excellent results are obtained. You can either flow your text, figures
and tables using multicols or you can use the textpos package to place
items (text boxes, figures, tables) directly at any point on the
canvas.

I find LaTeX not only much higher quality than all the other options
but also so much easier to use as I don't have to worry about most of
the formatting.

In case you cannot print to A0 or A1 directly, by the way, look at the
"poster" package in Debian -- I sometimes (to save money) print off a
poster generated using sciposter onto a number of A4 sheets, laminate
these and then stick them together when I put the poster up.  Not as
impressive/professional but useful for some conferences.  

> [1] I frequently ask the same question when making presentations in latex with 
> latex-beamer... if my presentations were all text, beamer would be fantastic 
> for it, but since they tend to be all graphics, I find myself spending hours 
> fiddling with diagrams in tikz and wonder if this really is the right tool 
> for the job.

At engineering conferences (as opposed to maths conferences where many
if not most speakers use LaTeX), given the frequent comments/questions
along the lines of "How did you generate such great looking figures"
when I've given talks based on tikz, I would suggest that the effort
is worth it.  Although tikz has a steep learning curve (the manual,
although comprehensive, can be difficult to navigate...), once you get
the hang of it, it's actually quite easy to churn out all kinds of
incredibly impressive (and very professional looking) diagrams.

I must say that tikz constantly amazes me: the package is an
incredible piece of coding.  I'm still learning it...

All of this reminds me to get back to working on my poster for next
week's conference! :-)