On 2007-April-28 , at 09:35 , Albert Cardona wrote:
I have no problem in writing a short article on how to compose posters for scientific conferences. I will put though a lot more attention to the poster itself -the art of catching the eye, balancing color contents, and doing whatever possible to attract attention, while delivering minimal but memorable information. Then, inserted, I'd put in tip-boxes on how to accomplish a given feature of the poster using Inkscape.
I don't know if it is really the intend of the showcase section to explain the design part of the poster, in particular because there are already numerous resources about this on the web (I guess you may know this one: http://www.tos.org/pdfs/sci_speaking.pdf). In my opinion it is more a showcase for Inkscape *features* i.e. explaining what makes it easier to work with Inkscape than with other software, how to achieve some effects with Inkscape etc. However if you write such an article I will surely be interested in it!
Sharing my posters is not a problem either, but they are *big*. 100 Mb is about the smallest -they're heavy on high-resolution images (I can, of course, make low-res jpegs if them, since they are uncompressed tiffs in most cases). Images are usually way bigger than their actual printing size in the poster (like, close to 12000 x 30000 pixels in one instance), that is why I don't care about automatic on-the-fly rescaling of the PDFs that Inkscape generates.
OK that's probably the explanation for the large size of your posters. It is true that high resolution uncompressed TIFFs are the best way to get nice results once printed, especially if you scale them up, but it is possible to achieve smaller sizes without sacrificing quality. I usually resize my images to their final physical size using a good quality scaling algorithm (Cubic or Lanczos interpolation in Gimp), use a resolution of 150dpi, and save them in PNG. 150dpi is smaller than the printer's resolution but I find it good enough for a poster, given that they are meant to be viewed from a distance. PNG compression does not affect image quality (as opposed to JPEG compression). This results in 1300*1750 pixels for a A4 size picture for example, which weights 2Mb in PNG versus 6.5Mb in TIFF. The only cumbersome part is that Inkscape does not currently honor resolution settings of imported image and rescales them to obtain a 90dpi resolution so I have to manually resize them in the toolbar after importing them but, well, I need to do it only once for each image.
Before 0.45, I had to create an encapsulated postcript and then use eps2pdf to create pdfs -but then transparencies were gone (AFAIK postscript doesn't support them, or for some reason they didn't make it to the .eps file).
You are right postscript does not support transparency.
Otherwise printers take the postcript and never rescale it to fit in the 43 inch paper roll -which is, honestly, a pain I should not spend time worrying about. And noone else for that matter. There is a measure of "good enough" where any work has reached a very presentable state while managing to avoid almost all annoying, voraciously-time-consuming details.
Another reason why I use final size from the start. I really don't want to worry about the scaling issues with the printer, about how my images will look once scaled etc. Working at final size throughout the production phase prevents you from bad surprises at the end (and given that there is always a rush to get those poster printed before boarding the plane for the meeting it is really valuable to know that everything will go smoothly!)
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/