Poster workshops will be offered before the SRS event in order to assist students in producing a masterful product that would be suitable for presentation at a professional conference within the student's discipline. The first event scheduled is a demonstration of different poster generating software options. The last two are workshops where there is discussion of successful poster designs. Although students may use any format that they wish as long as it meets the basic poster format requirements and can be converted to a PDF file, they are expected to produce a poster that is neat, easily read, and is effective in summarizing the student's research.

By attending one or more of the available workshops, a student can learn about the software and plotters used for making their poster and how to generate the final PDF version of their poster.

Workshop Dates, Times and Locations

A good way to learn about poster format/content that is appropriate for your discipline is to check web sites of professional societies.

SRS is like a professional conference in that your submitted work must be provided in a format that is easy to handle by the small group of people trying to get it to the reviewers and publishers. However, the path to getting your poster or paper into the required format (in this case PDF) can be a large part of the challenge in submitting your work.

Rather than trying to produce a general guide to the pros and cons of the conversion process, we are providing a set of instructions specific to various poster drafting choices on particular software platforms.

Please note that, regardless of the drafting program and computer platform you choose, any program that generates PDF files 'assumes' that the poster is in the correct final size (as described in the poster layout section on the poster instruction page). Therefore, it is important that your poster page size was correctly set in your drafting software, i.e. 42" high and 60" wide in landscape mode. Do not design your poster on letter-sized staionary and expect it to scale up to poster size without issues.

The ability to save files from any program into PDF format is built into the Macintosh operating system. So, if you are making your poster using any appropriate graphics program on the Mac, you should follow these steps:

1. Under 'Page Setup' select the appropriate page size when you design your poster.

2. When you are ready to print your poster, select 'Print' from the file menu and, when the dialog box opens, click on the button that says 'Save to PDF'

3. You will be asked for the name of the file and given a choice of where to save the file. The PDF file that is produced is the digital version of your poster.

Adobe products can save into PDF format on any platform.

Microsoft publisher can save into PDF format on Windows computers.