CTAN lists a lot of packages and frameworks for posters, but I found most of them too heavy/compl

Political Geography Conference Poster

ex. I don’t create a lot of conference posters and did not want to spend ages putting a few words and graphs on a sheet of glossy paper. At the end of the day, I decided to give beamerp

oster a spin. Beamerposter is an add-on that transforms my favourite presentation package into a poster printing machine. I did not really like the default themes, but Rob Hyndman has created a very alternative nice template that I adapted slightly.

I rather like the result and will go back to the package for the next poster.

Source: Long/Freese, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata

I use emacs/for all my textprocessing needs, and for the last four or five years, I have created all my slides with Till Tantaus excellent “beamer” class. At the moment, I’m teaching a 2nd year stats course (imagine doing this with PowerPoint – the horror! the horror!), so I sometimes use graphs from the assigned text like this one from Long&Freese that illustrates the latent variable/threshold interpretation of the binary logit model. The message should be fairly clear: depends on andfollows a standard logistic distribution around its conditional mean.

Click to download the animated PDF. Requires javascript, so view in Acrobat reader.

But the fact that the bell-curve lies flat in the plane confused my students no end. So I wasted half a day on creating a nice 3d-plot for them. After trying several options, I settled on pgfplots.sty, which builds on tikz/pgf, the comprehensive, portable graphics package designed by Tantau (here’s a gallery with most amazing examples of what you can do with this little gem). Plotting data and functions with pgfplots in 2d or 3d is a snap, so that was not too hard. Eventually.

Finally, in a desperate attempt to drive the message home, I enlisted the help of animate.sty, yet another amazing package that creates a javascript-based inline animation from my source (requires Acrobat reader). So the bell-curves pop out of the plane, in slow motion. Did it help the students to see the light? I have no idea. Here is the source.


#New implicit rules for conversion of eps->mp->mps
#Change path if you have installed pstoedit in some other place
%.mp : %.eps
c:\pstoedit/pstoedit.exe -f mpost $*.eps $*.mp

%.mps: %.mp
mpost $*.mp
mv $*.1 $*.mps
rm $*.mp

#Now specify a target

presentation.pdf: presentation.tex mytab1.tex myfig.mps

#Optional: if you want to create dataset x.eps, run x.do
#Stata must be in your path
%.eps : %.do
\tab wstata -e do $<

Now type make presentation.pdf, and make will call Stata, pstoedit, metapost and pdflatex as required. If you need more figures, just write the do-file and add a dependency.

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