Maths projects

Question number one (by a long shot) is how to make transparent boxes when producing a poster in LaTeX. The example below does this (making use of the 'pgf' and 'tikz' packages).

If you store the transparency.tex file (also displayed below) and the banner_bg.pdf image file in a directory and run

pdflatex transparency.tex

you will get a transparency.pdf output file which you can view or print.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{pgf}
\usepackage{tikz}


\begin{document}

% Add a background image for the full page

\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]
    \node[inner sep=0pt] at (current page.center) {%
        \includegraphics[width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight]{banner_bg}%
    };%
\end{tikzpicture}


% Now typeset a sample box, with a width equal to half the width 
% available for text

\noindent 
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node[text width=.5\textwidth,
      fill=yellow!30, 
      fill opacity=0.6,
      text opacity=1,
      inner sep=10pt]{
  {\bf\Large A transparent box}\\

  containing a lot of text containing a lot of text 
  containing a lot of text containing a lot of text 
  containing a lot of text containing a lot of text 
  containing a lot of text containing a lot of text 
  containing a lot of text containing a lot of text 
  containing a lot of text containing a lot of text 
  containing a lot of text containing a lot of text 
};
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}