Best software for constructing a poster for an academic conference.

[KenMac]

Hi all,
I am about to attend my first national meeting (Eastern Section of the Seismological Society of America) and I am very excited. However, I will be presenting a poster at this conference and I am not sure what software to use to make it. Most grad students I know use Powerpoint to make posters, but I wondered if anyone knows a better program to use. I use Latex to write reports and Beamer for presentations but I am not sure how these would do on a poster. Any suggestions?
Thanks very much in advance!

[onero]

Hm, Powerpoint to make posters? That's new to me. In any case, I like Scribus for layout, and it's simple enough to start with. Just place image and text frames to make your layout. Initially, these will just be frames since there's no content yet, but when you're satisfied, you can right click and select Get Image / Get Text to fill in the sections (or manually type text in). Then you can format at will.

[DrOlaf]

How about LaTeX beamerposter?

http://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~dreuw/latexbeamerposter.php

If you are already familiar with beamer, it should be relatively straightforward to pick this up.

[Vivaldi Gloria]

Scribus? Gimp?

[xadder]

The a0poster LaTeX package worked very well for me, so if you normally use LaTeX then this is a good option I think. Even just a google search for a0poster gives quite a few web sides with tips.

[earlycj5]

Powerpoint for poster construction certainly is nothing new. Indeed for inclusion on my professional society CD of posters after the meeting it must be in Power Point format.

I have used OOo Impress and/or Powerpoint for my posters thus far.
http://flickr.com/photos/earlycj5/sets/72157601463711271/

While I'd prefer to use something like Inkscape and just export a PDF for printing the external forces make that difficult...

[pape]

I've used Scribus to make two poster presentations.

It's fairly straightforward WYSIWYG program. Basically you decide the size (I had A0), and set areas for figures and text. You can have a separate .txt file for the text that is then imported. It's possible to embed PDF images too, so that's how I solved issues with equations etc.

In the end, save it as a pdf, and take it to a print. It should look good - just make sure the dpi (dots per inch) is large enough for good quality.

[KenMac]

Thanks very much for all of the great suggestions. I am going to experiment with some different options but I suspect that Latex Beamerposter will do the trick. I didn't realize there was such a thing. Thanks!

[leishmaniac]

I've always used PowerPoint. I think it works great, but IT people tell me they don't like it because the colors are harder to control. I'm new to linux so don't know what works best in this environment, but I couldn't help but respond because I liked your Big Blue Umbutu logo, since I'm an alum.

:-)

[hugmenot]

Powerpoint for poster construction certainly is nothing new. Indeed for inclusion on my professional society CD of posters after the meeting it must be in Power Point format...

Sorry, but that’s just dumb.

[earlycj5]

Sorry, but that’s just dumb.

Don't apologize to me. I never said I liked it. I agree. A PDF should be the de facto format I think. Everyone can view PDFs.

[slaanco]

I can just recommend Scribus. I was in similar situation few months ago and everything well smoothly and straightforward with it. And you can optimize your pdfs for printing, which is a nice feature IMHO.