\documentclass{article}
%This is an example of how you might lay out a conference poster with
% LaTex.

\usepackage{type1cm} %% Allows you to scale fonts to any size
\usepackage{graphicx} %% Lets you add postscript figures
\usepackage{pstricks} %% Provides coloured text, filled boxes etc
\usepackage{multicol} %% Provides multi-column typesetting

%% This is how you set the paper size. Note how the paper size you
%% give is what LaTeX thinks it is using as it typesets. The final
%% output can be magnified to go on any size of paper e.g. if you
%% use a3paper, mag=707 your output is made 0.707 of its original size
%% so it actually fits on a4 paper

%% To expand A3 so the LONG side is 36 inches use mag=2185
%% To expand A3 so the SHORT side is 36 inches use mag=3090

\usepackage[dvips,a3paper,landscape,
    hmargin=1.2cm,tmargin=.8cm,bmargin=1.2cm,mag=3090]{geometry} 

%% You can specify explicit paper sizes like this:
%\usepackage[dvips,papersize={300mm,350mm},%
%   margin=0.8cm]{geometry}

% This is just to turn off page numbers
\pagestyle{empty}

% Colours. We use pstricks for colours on the basis that we need it
% for some other things too.
\newrgbcolor{Inblue}{0.00 0.62745 1.00}
\newrgbcolor{Inblue}{0.00 0.62745 1.00}
%\newrgbcolor{Inred}{1.00 0.0 0.36862}
\newcmykcolor{Inred}{0.00 0.84 0.63 0.00} %Uncoated
%\newcmykcolor{Inred}{0.00 1.00 0.63 0.00} %coated
\newrgbcolor{Inthistle}{0.8471 0.0 1.0}
\newrgbcolor{Inball}{0.5568 1.0 .6078}
\newrgbcolor{bordercolour}{0.00 0.62745 1.00}

\begin{document}
%  *** Begin code to draw border round poster ***
\psset{linewidth=0.1cm}
% Sets up lengths for frame
\newlength{\frameleft}
\newlength{\frameright}
\newlength{\frametop}
\newlength{\framebottom}
\setlength{\frameright}{\textwidth}
\setlength{\framebottom}{-\textheight}
\setlength{\frameleft}{-1.0cm}
\addtolength{\frameright}{0.0cm}
\setlength{\frametop}{0.6cm}
\addtolength{\framebottom}{-0.3cm}
% Draws a frame
\psframe[linecolor=bordercolour,cornersize=absolute,linearc=1]
(\frameleft,\framebottom)(\frameright,\frametop)
%   *** Border finished *** 

%% To lay out little chunks of text, we use a minipage.
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.5\linewidth}
{ \Huge {\bf Making posters with \LaTeX}\\
A guide to doing things the simple way.}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.4\linewidth}
Hugh C. Pumphrey \\ 
School of Geosciences\\
The University of Edinburgh
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.22\linewidth}
\includegraphics[width=0.22\linewidth]{eushield.ps}
\end{minipage}

% This is the sideways spacing between the columns of  text
\columnsep=15pt 
% This is the thickness of the black line between the columns of text
\columnseprule=0.5pt 

%% This is the width your figures will be
\newlength{\figwidth}
\setlength{\figwidth}{0.24\linewidth}
%                     ^
% Set this number-----| to be a bit less than
%      1/this number
%                 |
%                 V
\begin{multicols}{4}

% Can't use the figure environment within multicolumns. Set up our own 
% counter for figures.
\newcounter{figscount}


{\large \Inblue \LaTeX\ can be a useful tool for producing conference 
posters, assuming that you like it already. I don't imagine that fans
of PowerPoint or Illustrator are going to take it up in droves. But
they don't usually care how beautifully their equations are
typeset. This poster explains how I have gone about typesetting
posters with \LaTeX\ and is itself an example. I certainly don't claim
that it is the only way, or the best way of doing this.}

% \section{Font test}
% {\tiny This is tiny.}\\
% {\scriptsize This is scriptsize.}\\
% {\footnotesize This is footnotesize.}\\
% {\small This is small.}\\
% {\normalsize This is normalsize.}\\
% {\Large This is Large.}\\
% {\LARGE This is LARGE.}\\
% {\huge This is huge.}\\
% {\Huge This is Huge.}\\
% {\HUGE This is HUGE.}

\section{Introduction}

Time was when people constructed conference posters by pinning
individual pages to the board provided. You were jolly sophisticated
if you used a coloured backing card for each page. The poster printer
has become a common item in large university departments and computing
centres and no self-respecting conference-goer nowadays wants to be seen
producing their poster with anything else. The poster printer is still
an expensive, temperamental and very slow device, however, often minded
by a technician who does not suffer fools gladly. The running costs
are high, too, at \pounds 10 per poster for plain paper and \pounds 30
for glossy. So everyone wants their poster to print right first time.

You can lay out a poster with a vector drawing package (anything from
the free and cheerful xfig to the nastily expensive Illustrator) or a
specialist layout package (free scribus, expensive
Quark/InDesign). You can even use Microsoft PowerPoint to do the job.
If you know and love one of those packages it is probably your best
bet. If, however, you know and love \LaTeX\ and you care deeply about
how your mathematics are typeset, you may want to use it to make
posters. My aim in this poster is to show you how it can be done,
allowing you to concentrate a lot on your material and a little on
your layout and to worry hardly at all about the undeniable vileness
that \LaTeX\ sometimes seems to impose on you.

\section{Paper and font sizes}
Traditionally, \LaTeX\ has been wedded to a small number of paper sizes
and fonts. For making posters we need better control over both of
these. In particular, we need to be able to use both the 36 inch or 48 inch
paper on the poster printer, but also to produce A4, A3 (or US letter)
size copies for handing out to interested parties. We may require
fonts in a wide variety of sizes, depending on how far from the poster
the audience are likely to be standing.

\subsection{Paper sizes}
To control these without giving yourself a headache, you need the
geometry package. The geometry package is your friend. Most \TeX\ 
distributions provide it, along with a very helpful manual. (The
manual is likely to be somewhere like {\tt \small
/usr/share/doc/texmf/latex/geometry/geometry.pdf}) Make sure that you
have version 3 of the geometry package (which came with teTeX 2.0 or
later) and not version 2 or earlier (which came with teTeX
1.x).  The geometry package allows you to control both the paper size that
\LaTeX\ thinks you want as it is setting the type and, quite
independently, the size that the final poster is produced at. For
example, you can say
\begin{verbatim}
\usepackage[dvips,a3paper,landscape,
    hmargin=1.2cm,tmargin=.8cm,bmargin=1.2cm,
    mag=707]{geometry} 
\end{verbatim}
and get your typesetting done for A3 paper, and then shrunk to A4 size
for output. If you set \verb+mag=3083+ instead, the poster will be
typeset exactly the same but will be scaled for 36 inch paper. This is
the only reliable way to get output for different sizes of paper. The
various post-processing programs that are supposed to re-size your
postscript file (such as {\tt poster} and {\tt psresize}) tend always
to do the wrong thing with \LaTeX\ + dvips output. I'm not sure what
stage of the process is at fault, but they are best avoided. 

You can specify quite arbitrary paper sizes and aspect ratios if you like:
\begin{verbatim}
\usepackage[dvips,papersize={300mm,350mm},
   margin=0.8cm]{geometry}
\end{verbatim}
Note that it is important to use the {\tt dvips} argument so that the
geometry package knows that the output will be processed by dvips.

\subsection{Font Sizes}
\LaTeX\ has traditionally provided only a small selection of font
sizes: {\tiny tiny, }{\scriptsize scriptsize, }{\footnotesize
  footnotesize, }{\small small, }{\normalsize normalsize, }{\large
  large, }{\Large Large, }{\LARGE LARGE, }{\huge huge, and }{\Huge
  Huge.}  For an A4 document that's about all you would need. However
these may not match up to your requirements for your poster. You can
work around this to a certain extent by choosing a paper size that
fits with the available fonts for your purposes and then scaling the
whole result with the {\tt mag=} argument of the geometry package.  If
that isn't enough, you need to use the {\tt type1cm} package, which
allows you to scale \LaTeX's fonts to any size. For example
\verb+\fontsize{1cm}{1.4cm}\selectfont+ allows you to
use\\{\fontsize{1cm}{1.4cm}\selectfont letters that are 1\,cm tall
  with 1.4\,cm line spacing.}\\(Note that the line spacing value
doesn't have an affect in the above example. I think it only kicks in
at the start of a section. As a guide the second argument should be
1.2 times as big as the first.)  You can also use something like
{\small \begin{verbatim}
 \newcommand{\HUGE}{\fontsize{40}{45}\selectfont}
\end{verbatim}}
to define a new font size or 
{\small \begin{verbatim}
\renewcommand{\Large}{\fontsize{30}{35}\selectfont}
\end{verbatim}} 
to re-size one of the existing standard sizes.

\subsection{This example}
For this example we put the whole body of the poster into a
multicols environment, giving a rather formal `journal article'
feel. To do this, you need to \verb+\usepackage{multicol}+. I 
have made another example with a much looser layout, based on boxes --
it is called \verb+boxesposter.tex+.

\section{Figures}

Postscript figures may be included with the
\verb+\includegraphics+ command as usual. But
you can't use the figure environment and its captions inside a
multicols environment, so you have to place and caption the figures
yourself, and you have to introduce your own counter to get them
numbered automatically
\begin{minipage}{\figwidth}
\vspace{2mm}
{\includegraphics[width=\figwidth]{dull}}
\addtocounter{figscount}{1}
{\Inred Figure~\arabic{figscount}. This is the caption of a truly
unexciting figure. Because it is inside the same minipage as the
postscript graphic, it will never be broken across a column break and
will be the correct width}
\vspace{2mm}
\end{minipage}

It is important not to put an empty line before the minipage
containing the figure, or it will become indented, like the beginning
of a paragraph. You can use minipages to put the caption to the side
of a tall thin figure,like this:
\vspace{2mm}
\begin{minipage}{0.5\figwidth}
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\figwidth]{tall}}
\end{minipage}~\begin{minipage}{0.5\figwidth}
\addtocounter{figscount}{1}
{\Inred Figure~\arabic{figscount}. 
This caption is in a separate minipage from its figure.}
\end{minipage}
\vspace{1mm}\\
Note how the non-breaking space between the two minipages forces the
caption and the figure to appear on the same line. Laying out material
with many figures and little text in a multicolumn environment can be
rather frustrating as \LaTeX\ does not have enough freedom to
re-arrange the text within the columns and may leave large amounts of
white space. A final, and huge, frustration is that although setting
up your own counter is easy, I cannot find how to set a
cross-referencing label to take on the value of that counter.

\section{Getting it printed}

The result of typesetting this poster with
\verb+latex myfile ; dvips myfile -o+ should be a postscript file
which is ready to go to an a4 postscript printer (or via ghostscript,
to any other a4 printer), assuming you have {\tt mag=707}.  Alter the
{\tt mag=} argument and re-process to make a file printable on a
different size of paper.  One issue I have yet to address is the
orientation of your poster. I'll comment on that once I have printed
out my example. It ought to be possible to print out the poster with
the 36 inch either as the long or the short side. There is the obvious
possibility of getting it wrong in the latter case and losing some of
the poster off the side of the roll. See my other example,
boxesposter, for a solution to this problem.

\end{multicols}
\end{document}
