Making a poster without making a poster
-------------------------------------------
Some times you will need to make a poster, and this can waste a ton of time.
A quick solution is to use pdflatex and the tikz package (both installed in the texlive package). 

1. First prepare a set of slides that you want to use and create a PDF (e.g. slides.pdf).

2. Use pdftk to burst the pdf into separate files:

.. code-block:: bash

  $ pdftk slides.pdf burst
  $ ls pg*
  pg_0001.pdf  pg_0003.pdf  pg_0005.pdf  ...

3. Now pick which 9 slides you want, and edit the following latex input file (:download:`poster.tex`).
   This file will then be used as input for the slideshow.py script (see our software repository for this).

.. code-block:: latex

  \documentclass{standalone}
  \usepackage{tikz}
  \begin{document}
  \begin{tikzpicture}
  \node               (s1)               { \includegraphics[width=4in]{pg_0001.pdf} };
  \node[anchor=west]  (s2) at (s1.east)  { \includegraphics[width=4in]{pg_0002.pdf} };
  \node[anchor=west]  (s3) at (s2.east)  { \includegraphics[width=4in]{pg_0003.pdf} };
  \node[anchor=north] (s4) at (s1.south) { \includegraphics[width=4in]{pg_0004.pdf} };
  \node[anchor=west]  (s5) at (s4.east)  { \includegraphics[width=4in]{pg_0005.pdf} };
  \node[anchor=west]  (s6) at (s5.east)  { \includegraphics[width=4in]{pg_0006.pdf} };
  \node[anchor=north] (s7) at (s4.south) { \includegraphics[width=4in]{pg_0007.pdf} };
  \node[anchor=west]  (s8) at (s7.east)  { \includegraphics[width=4in]{pg_0008.pdf} };
  \node[anchor=west]  (s9) at (s8.east)  { \includegraphics[width=4in]{pg_0009.pdf} };
  \node[anchor=south,scale=3.5,blue,inner sep=0.5mm] (title) at ([yshift=2mm]s2.north) 
  {A new approach to the interacting phonon problem};
  \node[anchor=north,scale=1.2,inner sep=0.5mm] (me) at ([yshift=2mm]title.south) 
  {Authors; Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics; Columbia University};
  \node[anchor=south west] at ([yshift=1mm]s1.north west) { \includegraphics[width=0.45in]{seas_hammer_crown} };
  \node[anchor=south east] at ([yshift=1mm]s3.north east) { \includegraphics[width=0.45in]{seas_hammer_crown} };
  \end{tikzpicture}
  \end{document}

5. The above script includes the SEAS logo "seas_hammer_crown.png". This one, and others, can be found in the following git repository:

.. code-block:: bash

  grandcentral:/home/cam1/git_repos/dissemination.git

6. Compile the latex file to pdf as usual:

.. code-block:: bash

  $ pdflatex poster.tex