/ecr-poster

Primary LanguageTeX

ECR Poster LateX Document Class

Introduction

This LateX document class provides a basic framework with which to create Edinburgh Centre for Robotics (ECR) branded posters with. It makes use of the TikZPoster (see CTAN) at its base and builds on top of it.

More information about the ECR is available on their website.

Usage

This is a drop-in document class that you can use right away. It makes use of the TikZPoster document class, and so depends on the TikZPoster package - make sure this and all its dependencies are installed (more info at CTAN).

  1. Add the ecrposter.cls file to your work directory
  2. In your new LaTeX document, set your document class to ecrposter. The options supported by the document class are identical to that used by TikZPoster, so have a look at their documentation for possible options.
    The default options are: 17pt, a1paper, and landscape
  3. Populate the title information by executing the \title, \author, and \institute macros
  4. Within the \begin{document} ... environment call the \maketitle macro to generate the title
  5. Populate the document with your content :D

Contributors

More to follow...

License

Though this document class is accessible to the public, the logos of the Edinburgh Center for Robotics (ECR), Heriot-Watt University, The University of Edinburgh, and The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) are their property and must only be used in accordance with their regulations.

The licensing of this document class is yet to be determined, copyright is held by the ECR.

Extras

SVG to PDF

Evidently, this is not trivial as most of the tools that exist to do this (InkScape, Adobe Illustrator, etc.) will tend to rasterise parts of the SVG in the process of converting it. This can contribute to an increase in file size as well, and more importantly, a decrease in quality.

One solution that we've found to solve this is to use the cairo and libzsvg libraries to do the conversion - they avoid the aforementioned problems (mostly). The tool to do this is either svg2pdf or svgconvert. You'll need to compile the tool yourself, ensuring that all dependencies are met.

Detecting rasterised content in PDF files

Depending on what tool suite is used to generate a PDF file, it may opt to generate bitmaps/lossy versions of any vector graphics. This leads to bad visual scaling of the PDF. There are several ways of determining whether a PDF contains rasterised content or not.

  1. Visually check the PDF by zooming in and out of parts of the document to see if anything is pixelated or not.
  2. Search the PDF file for the /image token: grep -c -i "/image" PDF-FILE.pdf.
  3. Use a tool like pdfimages to list/extract any bitmaps from the PDF: pdfimages -list PDF-FILE.pdf