LaTeX, a0poster,tikz and multicols

Question

I'm using the multicol package inside an a0poster document class. I am trying out a 3 column layout for a portrait poster. I have a large tikz drawing that I want to put inside a figure environment inside a column. If I put the figure inside the multicols environment, the picture disappears. In fact, I can only get text to stick to the columns at all is to enclose it in a minipage and set the width to \columnwidth. But figure doesn't like being inside minipage, so that didn't work. What is going on here? The documentation for a0poster seems minimal at best.

So my question is, where can I find some guidance on how to use a0poster, or is there some better way of making an academic poster in LaTeX?

[When I tried to come up with a minimal example, things messed up even further, when I ran pdftex on the minimal code, it would make a big a0 page, but then when I tried to view it, it thought it was a4, so I could only see the top left corner of the page.]

Answer 1

I think the question is, why do you want to put the tikz drawing inside a figure? Are you hoping it will float to the top of one column? For a poster I would just use brute force and put \break and the tikz drawing in the places they need to go.

If I had to guess, I would guess that figures and multicols are not playing nicely together. I suggest you try a similar example on a document of article class and ordinary size.

Answer 2

\figure won't work in a multicol-environment

But it's OK just roll your own, try putting this in the preamble:

\newcommand{\myfig}[3][0]{%
\includegraphics[width=#3,angle=#1]{#2}
\nobreak\medskip
}

AND

\setcounter{figure}{1}
\newcommand{\mycaption}[1]{%
\vspace{5mm}
\begin{quote}
\textbf{\itshape Figure \arabic{figure}}: {\itshape #1}
\end{quote}
\vspace{10mm}
\stepcounter{figure}
}