A few weeks ago, I asked on the list about where to get posters printed, and what tools to use to make them. One of us has a 36 inch wide format HP printer, and we spend a pleasant wednesday evening getting GIMP to print one set of posters. I ran off another set (as backup) at Orifice Depot today - that cost $36 for 18 square feet. A lot cheaper than Kinkos, and that business in Beaverton (who shall remain nameless) promised 3 days for sure, but did not deliver in five. My complements to Adam at the Cedar Hills Orifice Depot.
For tools, I originally set out to use Scribus - but that is a workflow tool that assumes correct input text, without math. Next I tried LyX, built on LaTeX, but there aren't any poster templates for that. Finally, I dived down into LaTeX using the sciposter class, knocked out first pass posters plus illustrations in a week (some illos took a day each), then started to tweak. It took a couple of passes. It is amazing how some mistakes are invisible on the screen, but glare at you in 24 point text. Look at the PDF attachment at http://server-sky.com/Brown2013 Since I grew up with troff, and use TeX format for equations on my wiki, LaTeX wasn't difficult to learn. A great book is Kopka and Daly, "A Guide to LaTeX". I got the second edition at Goodwill books online for $3, and the fourth edition is probably even more marvelous. Other notes: TAP plastic sells three inch by two foot transparent plastic tubes with endcaps for $7.50, good for strips of poster and presumably good for getting them through airport security. Also at O.D., they have Lexar S73 "USB3" thumb drives cheap. I bought a 64GB for $40. They apparently aren't as fast as most USB3 drives, and some folks have suffered failures with them - from the sounds of the complaints, these may not do erased sector recovery well. Time will tell. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
