Thursday, September 13, 2012

1st Poster for retreat 9/16/12

Part I before started

Some good websites before making the poster:

1. a post I read at the beginning about how to make a poster, very useful
http://colinpurrington.com/tips/academic/posterdesign

2. A very useful blog for making poster using inkscape (very detailed, step by step) http://orangenarwhals.blogspot.com/2012/05/caffeines-impact-on-sleep-inkscape-a0.html

and her previous post for making poster too
http://nouyang.blogspot.com/2012/04/tools-for-scientific-posters-braindump.html

3. Kuler, a website for color pallets
http://kuler.adobe.com/#

4. Some poster examples
1) F1000 posters
http://f1000.com/posters/browse/summary/1092168

2) Some flicker albums
pimp my poster
http://www.flickr.com/groups/pimpmyposter/pool/with/5451179867/

poster sessions
http://www.flickr.com/groups/postersessions/

There are actually more templates for powerpoint poster than in inkscape. I just found template of inkscape from a source from ref [2] (and traced one back) above. Actually the use of inkscape is quite smooth, and can have higher quality (I think). However, there's a little pain when I want to export to pdf, and when I want to insert equation into the poster.


Part II some problems and my solutions

I used inkscape v0.47 on our machine (linux, centOS), there are several problems that I encountered.
1. latex into inkscape
2. superscript
3. export to pdf

1. Although under label "extension->render->latex...", there's an option to type in latex grammar equation, and generate svg graph inside of inkscape, there're some bugs in it that for some reason, some symbols cannot be recognized and keeping outputting errors.

I looked at the webpage about inkscape,
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Extension_repository
and tried inklatex and textext extension. For some reason, they won't work on the version I have or keep throwing errors or forced to quit my program. I tried another way. I go to my latex editor on my mac to generate .tex file, and then with the help of this svg latex site, I used linux command to convert my .tex file into svg by using the same command as shown.

latex 
dvips
pstoedit


2. There is superscript function in the version v0.48, but not in v0.47. Because our centOS system needs updated, we lack some components or would bring into conflict if we install v0.48. The basic trick is to select the number or word. Press "Alt" and upper arrow to move upwards. For some reason, it does not work every time. I haven't figured out why it sometimes work, sometimes don't.

3. For export to pdf, the default "save as .." option in inkscape will generate a very large pdf file (~24MB), and cannot usually open by my mac or the PC at the printing facility. The alternative way is to generate .eps file and then convert eps to pdf. The output file is about 2.2MB.


http://linux.die.net/man/1/epstopdf

One annoying thing is that the resolution does not seem high, and even I adjust the dpi from 150 to 300 for outputing eps file, it still generate file with the same size, which made no difference. I hope there will be better ways to do this. 



2 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. That is everything about the Science and about the arts that will make you focus on the points you retreated here with the sufficient reference. academic poster design

    ReplyDelete

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