Change default formatting of \author with Sciposter class

Question

Latex is something new to me, so I don't know some basics yet. I am making a poster with sciposter and want to change the formatting of the authors names. The names are written in bold by default, and I want them to come out as normal text. How can I do that?

So far, the only thing I was able to change in the author output was its size, with the \renewcommand{\authorsize}{\Large} command.

Answer 1

The class formats the author in the title using the following:

{\authorsize {\bf\@author} \par}

The above shows that the \@author - stored with a call to \author{<author>} is always set in \bf, making changes to \authorsize that include font weight completely useless. Perhaps that was the intent as the macros only refers to size, not the font. Redefining \authorsize to remove \bf is an option:

\documentclass{sciposter}

\leftlogo[0.52]{example-image-10x16}
\title{Generalized Pattern Spectra Sensitive to Spatial Information}
\author{Michael H.F. Wilkinson}
\institute{Institute for Mathematics and Computing Science \\
  University of Groningen, P.O. Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen,
  The Netherlands}
\email{michael@cs.rug.nl}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\authorsize}[1]{\mdseries\Large\@author}
\makeatother

\maketitle

\end{document}

Patching \maketitle using etoolbox is also an option:

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\patchcmd{\maketitle}% <cmd>
  {\authorsize {\bf\@author}}% <search>
  {{\bfseries\authorsize\@author}}% <replace>
  {}{}% <success><failure>
\makeatother

The above patch reverses the use of \bf in setting the author, placing \authorsize after \bfseries. This allows you to introduce font weight and shape updates which should override the setting of the author in bold using something like

\renewcommand{\authorsize}{\mdseries\Large}