On 2007-April-28 , at 06:27 , Albert Cardona wrote:

We use Inkscape to make posters for scientific meetings. The ease with which we can create beautiful, unintrusive text boxes and flow charts is unparalleled. And of course cartoons of all sorts. I can't hardly believe we used to bring in PowerPoint for the task! those nightmarish days are over. Plus, Inkscape intergrates very well with the host OS, i.e. dragging and dropping images and text just works.

In this regard, I must mention that exporting to PDF is a big deal. Figuring out the exact dimensions of the poster relative to the final print is some sort of obscure magic for us, simple mortal users. With PDFs, printers (or their drivers) have zero problems to scale on the fly and thus generate perfect maximized print outs of our gigantic posters.

That's very nice to know! I also use Inkscape to do scientific posters and as I don't want to bother with scaling computations I usually design it directly at final size. Inkscape deals as easily with a 1m*1m page than with an A4 one and it allows me to specify sizes (including font sizes) in cm and get a better feeling of how big things will actually be. In addition, raster images (jpeg, png, tiff and the like) are often imported among the scalable objects and having them included at their final size allows me to know how pixelized they will appear in print.

What surpises me, though, is that exporting to PDF seems to leave images uncompressed, resulting in 300+ Mb posters.

I don't know which pdf exporter you used (regular PDF or Cairo PDF) but at some point these exporters "rasterize" some elements (another reason why designing the poster at final size in interesting: these elements still look sharp and crisp). Transparent areas or gradients for example are converted from scalable entities to a bunch of pixels. Given how big posters usually are it implies creating a large number of pixels hence the size. Nevertheless I never experienced such large sizes!

In short: congratulations! And keep at it! We take time to tell our visitors (at the poster, during the conference) how the poster was made, since they usually comment on how beautiful it looks (no kidding). Inkscape, Blender and ImageJ are always mentioned.

I usually include inkscape logo in a corner of the poster, together with the website address, to give credit to the Inkscape team for their work. Inkscape logo is so nice and original that it can even attract readers!

There is section on the website dedicated to use cases of Inkscape in "real life". What about adding a part explaining the design of scientific posters? I had prepared a few screenshots some time ago and I re-wrote accompanying texts (see below - please correct my english where necessary). What do people think? Is it good enough for the website? BTW Bryce or anyone, it seems I can't connect to inkscape.org currently (I get a 104 error: "Connection reset by peer" from osuosl)

-------------------------- A scientific poster has to be precisely organized, full of information, yet visually attracting to gather a large audience. Furthermore it should be printable at different sizes (final size poster and handouts). Inkscape gives us scalability and an unparalleled ease of use which allow to meet these goals elegantly. It make you forget the nightmarish days when you used PowerPoint for the task! The poster below was designed entirely in Inkscape for presentation on a 4-foot-high by 8-foot-wide poster board (1.2m x 2.4m). The page size was set up to be the final printing size because Inkscape deals with it as well as with an A4 page. http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/ poster_publish_ghostscript.pdf [WARNING: big file. 7.5 Mb]

Temporarily masking layers and using the outline mode allowed to work on this complicated file (> 5000 paths, large amount of text) while keeping things responsive enough even on a mid level laptop. http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/poster_inkscape_outline.png

The gradients and scripts from the "Effects" menu helped to create an attractive look [note: this was pre 0.45 so blur was not current yet]. The bitmap tracing feature and Open Clipart Library provided scale independent eye candy for some illustrations. http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/poster_inkscape_eye_candy.png

The text was flowed into custom shaped frames so that it had a "clever" position with respect to the graphics. It was edited though the Text Tool palette which was easier on the eye and helped to focus on content rather than on layout for a while. http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/poster_inkscape_text.png

All scientific plots were produced in scalable formats and converted to SVG. They were therefore completely editable within the poster which allowed to have a unified look (for the fonts, line width, colors etc.). The "Apply style" command (SHIFT+CTRL+V), the styles bar and the swatches panel, helped to work with styles quickly and easily. http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/poster_inkscape_style1.png http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/poster_inkscape_style2.png

Finally the SVG file was exported to EPS or PDF for print. The text was converted to shapes to avoid font problems when bringing the file to the printing company. The PDF scaled down nicely to fit an A4 and hence serve as handouts. --------------------------

JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/