graphic design layout advice sought

[trochee]

I will be writing a poster for the LSA conference in a few weeks.

My results for the poster aren't all finished yet, but I would like it to look sharp. I don't have (or want) Powerpoint, and I'm working on my entirely-adequate Ubuntu laptop for nearly everything I'm working on.

So do any of you have suggestions for a good layout tool that will be able to mix graphical design and text layout? This poster will probably be a mixture of diagrams, tables, and prose. I could probably coerce LaTeX into doing something, but I'd rather use something like the old PageMaker .

those of you who know it -- is Scribus ready for prime time? I would consider Inkscape, but it seems a little too close to the graphics end -- flowing text into a paragraph there seems difficult. (this is an academic poster, not a wheat-paste poster, so the ability to modify text easily while I'm still developing the poster design feels important to me).

Does Scribus work for any of you? Any alternative suggestions for accessible (open source?) poster design tools?

Comments

[trochee.livejournal.com]

when I have a side-by-side comparison, I will definitely include OO Draw and OO impress (~Powerpoint), both of which seem like good baselines to compare.

Last time I checked, openoffice draw doesn't seem very good at letting me tweak stuff, but it may have changed in the latest edition. OO Impress -- which is the powerpoint clone -- seems like it is better designed for slides than for posters.

I think I only said "powerpoint" because somebody in Seattle went to the trouble of using Powerpoint to set up posters in the past, so a bunch of people in my lab have done it with powerpoint. But it seems better to look for a tool that's specifically designed for this task. I will compare those tools too, though, when I take a look at Scribus (and/or any other suggestions made here). thanks for the reminder!

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

I've seen some very nice posters done in PowerPoint, although when I tried to use it myself, it was not long before I gave up in frustration. Of the two posters I've ever presented, I used Michael Wilkinson's sciposter.cls in LaTeX for the second (this year); for the first (about a decade ago), I think I used Uhu. I was pretty satisfied with the LaTeX one, although given the amount of tweaking I did to it, I'm not sure how much the sciposter document class really contributed apart from setting things up for A0 paper and a honking big default font size. The wallpaper.sty package was useful for the background.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

"uhu" meaning rubber-cement and scissors?

(oh, and thanks for sciposter -- that's a good place to start for that perspective.)