Preparing posters in LaTeX and how to print them

This page describes a way to prepare posters in using the LaTeX document preparation system. A note of caution: LaTeX is not necessarily the best way to make your poster! Only read on if you have convinced yourself that it is the best option for you.

Setting onto an A0 page

Make use of the a0poster document class which sets the right font sizes, etc. This file is usually included with Tex distributions.

Turning you DVI into a PDF file

You target file format will probably be Portable Document Format. I turn my .dvi files into .pdf format using following sequence of commands:

dvips -j0 -Pcmz -Pamz ?-Ppdf? inname -o outname
ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress inname outname

The options -Pcmz -Pamz to dvips try to convince it to use Type 1 fonts which can be rendered at any resolution. The prepress setting to ps2pdf uses various options to optimize for good quality printout, see this page on ps2pdf for details. Newer versions of dvips understand option -Ppdf which further optimises the output for later conversion to pdf.

Graphics utility programs

Conversion of bitmap files to postscript is a problem which often comes up. I've used convert from ImageMagick to satisfactory results. Other options are:

• BMEPS[1][2] Converts PNG files to postscript.
• jpeg2ps[1] Unsurprisingly, this converts jpeg files to postscript.