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.

If you use this template, it’d be nice of you to leave a comment below saying what you did or did not like about it. It would also be nice if you gave the Mac Singularity web site a little-font credit in your acknowledgments, but that’s not mandatory.

I suppose if it truly became popular at AAS we’d have a bunch of posters looking the same and that’d be silly. So, I should come up with some alternative color schemes and fonts and all.