Apple Pages – Perfect Poster App?
June 5th, 2005 by admin
So, this week I made a poster for the Tex-Mex 9 conference in San Antonio, which I’m off to tomorrow. My tool of choice, Apple’s new Pages program, part of iWork which also includes Keynote.
In the past, I had tried to use Powerpoint. The problem with Powerpoint for posters is twofold. One, powerpoint is not geared for printing. It’s design for screen presentation. The concepts of inches and page and paper sizes are not particularly meaningful to it. The second, bigger, problem is that it rasterizes vector graphics such as PDFs and EPS files.
What is rasterizing you ask? It takes the vector format, which is infinitely scaleable, and turns it into a bitmapped graphic of a fixed resolution….
Here we have a PDF graphic and a TIFF graphic (exported from Preview from the PDF). They look the same, no? (To fit on this page I had to rescale the screen cap, so neither looks that great actually.
Oh wait! When we zoom in, it looks awful. The one on the left is resolutionless, it’s a vector description… the one on the right is bitmapped, it’s pixels – like it was scanned.
So I take PDFs or EPS files that look like the image on the left, plunk them into Powerpoint, and when it prints out in big poster size I get garbage like that on the right. Not just for logos, but for my graphs and such too.
It was with great joy I discovered that Keynote, Apple’s presentation program, understands PDFS, and doesn’t rasterize them. It treams them and prints them as vector graphics and they look great. The problem, however, was that Keynote still was a presentation program. It didn’t understand page sizes, it just understood screen sizes. It wasn’t ideal.
But this year, along came Pages – very similar to Keynote, but specifically for laying out … well … pages. It comes with some very nice templates for fliers, resums, newsletters. It’s tightly integrated with iPhoto so it’s easy to drop in pictures, etc.
But for the cause of poster making, posters for a scientific conference, it’s fabulous. It supports columns very easily. It supports vector PDFs. It allows a graphic to either move with text or stay affixed in a specific spot on the page … with or without word wrap. It’s great!
My only early concerns were that Pages can sometimes be slow, and this was hampering me when I tried to turn my old poster into a poster template for Pages. But I didn’t have that problem this time. I plan on making a Poster Template for pages available for download soon.
Meanwhile, check back for a PDF of my poster after the conference.
Tags: apple, keynote, pages, PDF, posters, powerpoint — .
Larry Weisenthal Says
Thank you very much. I’ve got a new MacBook and I had to create a 44 x 96 inch poster for a scientific meeting. I had no clue how to do it. I Googled and got this web page. I’d been struggling with Keynote. I didn’t even know if I had Pages installed. So I just spotlighted “Pages” and there it was. And it worked as easily as you said it would. Thank you. Thank you!
Jan 17th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Marcos Says
Glad I could help. It looks like the Poster template has been downloaded 22 times in January, that’s about one a day.
How about if those who use the template put a little small text note saying ‘made in pages, template from Macsingularity.org” or some such thing? Not required, but it’d be a nice gesture.
I think perhaps the next version of the template should add a bit more color… it’s kind of austere and white at the moment.
Jan 20th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Cheryl Says
Well, I just downloaded the template, but it looks pretty much the same (layout-wise) as what I just created on my own =). So, I hope you won’t mind that I don’t credit you, since it was a lucky convergence. (And I’m sure to change fonts/ colors/ etc as it comes along.) On the other hand, thanks for the assurance that this is the right app for the job — I’m on a tight deadline at the moment, but it dawned on me that Pages might be just the thing (after many prior fights with Powerpoint and Photoshop for posters of yore…) Thanks!
Feb 13th, 2007 at 2:08 am
Marcos Says
Yeah, looking at it recently I realize it’s not that exciting of a template…. maybe when I make my next poster I’ll come up with something more exciting.
Glad you found Page’s talent for posters!
Feb 13th, 2007 at 3:28 am