As I had to make a poster for the TALN 2011 conference to illustrate my short paper (PDF, in French), I decided to use LaTeX, even if it was not the easiest way. I am quite happy with the result (PDF).
I gathered a few links that helped me out. My impression is that there are two common models, and as I matter of fact I saw both of them at the conference. The one that I used, Beamerposter, was “made in Germany” by Philippe Dreuw, from the Informatics Department of the University of Aachen. I only had to adapt the model to fit my needs, which is done by editing the .sty file (it is self-explanatory).
The other one, BA Poster, was “made in Switzerland” by Brian Amberg, from the Computer Science Department of the University of Basel.
And here are the links :
- General information collected on the UK List of TeX Frequently Asked Questions on the Web
- Official page of the Beamerposter class
- BA Poster Official page
- PracTeX article “Writing posters in LaTeX” by Tomas Morales de Luna
- Last but not least, installing LaTeX packages on a Debian-based distribution, on the Ubuntu community documentation