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:

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

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

\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}

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

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

  1. Compile the latex file to pdf as usual:

$ pdflatex poster.tex