Friday, 4 October 2013

TeX Poster

I just finished my first poster using LaTeX, with mixed feelings but an overall positive impression ... The first reason for using LaTeX rather than a regular editor was that I wanted to include equations, which I had already set in LaTeX, and the second was that I wanted to include lots of little pictures, which I did not want to arrange and crop individually. As a template I used baposter, which made it surprisingly easy to get a quite professionally looking poster. And even adapting it to our group design worked well.

Aside from nice looking equations, and well arranged graphics an advantage of LaTex is that it is easy to include things as vector graphics, which means that these things will also look nice when expanded to poster format. For example the image in the Introduction box was drawn as a vector graphic with Inkscape   (exported as pdf) . In the poster you can zoom in as far as you want into this graphic and will never see a pixel (this is not the case in the above shown jpeg, though).

The problem with LaTeX is that some things tend to be really difficult even when they are really easy in direct editors. For example, to get the header in front of the logo, I had to play around with TikZ. And it took me quite some time to figure out how to have text and figure next to each other in one of those boxes (e.g. in the Introduction). The code I finally used looks like this

\hbox{
 \parbox{0.75\textwidth}{
  Analysis of excited states in large systems.
  \begin{itemize}
   \item Reconstruct an effective ...
  \end{itemize}
  ...
 }
 \parbox{0.25\textwidth}{\includegraphics[width=0.2\textwidth]{exc2p.pdf}}
}

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