LaTeX

For Poster Presentations, in Particular

TeX Formats

NRAO's RHEL6 TeX package includes the TeXLive-2007 implementation (based on Web2C TeX) as well as the Omega extension for typesetting two-byte Unicode characters (non-Latin). However, many implementations/extensions of TeX are available that may include more sophisticated editors and support for OpenType fonts which are not natively supported in LaTeX. See Resources, below, for more information.

On NRAO macOS systems, LaTeX (MacTeX-20YY) is available as an optional install package via Managed Software Update for all systems running OSX 10.13 or later.

Fonts

The default LaTeX fonts, cm (Computer Modern) and ec (European Computer Modern), are Type 3 bitmap fonts which cannot be scaled, resulting in pixelation. Therefore, choose scalable fonts like Type 1 (PostScript) or OpenType.

Using TrueType fonts can be tricky due to missing or incorrect glyph names as well as device dependency, but some TeX formats like ProTEXt and its predecessor, MiKTeX (both for Windows), are easier to use than others.

An extension of TeX, XeTeX (included in the current release of TeXLive), supports fonts native to your computer's OS such as OpenType fonts which provide the richest set of features and portability across platforms; although XeTeX works with TeXLive-2007, it is not installed on NRAO RHEL6 systems.

For more information, reference The State of Text Rendering, Adobe's article on Font Formats , the Tex Users Group Fonts and TeX article, and the CTAN survey of free math fonts. For a detailed explanation of how Type 1 and TrueType fonts convert to PDF from TeX, reference the article by Han The Thanh, A Closer Look at TrueType Fonts and PDFLaTeX.

Graphics

TeX-supported Formats

PNG - lossless, Deflate compression is less effective than JPG; does not distort sharp edges

JPG - lossy, high compression; distortion of sharp edges and other image data - 2014 brings a new lossless software reference standard

PDF - pdf can contain text, vector drawings, and bitmap drawings as a single image as well as an entire document.

MetaPost - language for producing technical drawings with Postscript output; integratable with TeX

Astronomical Image Processing Output and TeX

AIPS - The tasks LWPLA, TVCPS, and TVRGB offer the option to save as an .eps filetype which can then be converted to .pdf with epstopdf or to another format with Gimp.

CASA - ouput types: jpg, pdf, png are supported in TeX. Additional output types ps, xbm, xpm, and ppm can be converted with Gimp.

FITS - Although .tif images produced by FITS Liberator are not directly supported by TeX, FITSview, Gimp or another image viewer/converter can be used to convert them to a supported file type.

Equations

There are many good LaTeX poster templates available on the internet (see Resources, below), but if you would rather not use LaTeX to create the entire poster, you can use it to create a file of the equation in one of the TeX supported formats: .png, .jpg, .pdf.

1. After writing the equation in LaTeX, create a PDF file using pdfTeX, or similar application available with your distribution. Then, open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro on the Windows Terminal Server, cvtsa.ad.nrao.edu.

2. Within Adobe Acrobat Pro, click "Edit," then "Take a Snapshot." Hold + left-click to select the formula area, then release and click "Ok" to copy to the Windows clipboard.

3. Click "File," then "Save as..." Click "Image" and finally, select "PNG", if available, or "JPEG."

After saving the image to your filer share, it can be inserted into any poster created in Powerpoint, Publisher, Libre/Open Office Impress/Draw or Adobe Illustrator.

A web resource is the Online Latex Equation Editor which converts the equation you enter into the editor into the following file types: .gif, .png, pdf, .swf, .emf, .svg. Additionally, it generates code to display the equation in the following languages and platforms: HTML, HTML using pre tags, LaTeX, TiddlyWiki, phpBB, and WordPress.

Printing

Poster printing in Charlottesville utilizes the HP Z6100 plotter which must interface with a Windows machine; therefore, it is necessary to convert the .tex file to .pdf by using pdfLaTeX or a similar utility that works with your implementation. See Resources, below.