poster - postscript scaling program

[Frank Cox]

I've briefly looked that this in the past, but just got around to actually playing with it today.

ftp://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/fed...7.fc33.src.rpm

Here's part of the man page for it:

NAME
poster - Scale and tile a postscript image to print on multiple pages

SYNOPSIS
poster <options> infile

DESCRIPTION
Poster can be used to create a large poster by building it from multiple pages and/or printing it on large media. It expects as input a generic (encapsulated) postscript file, normally printing on a single page. The output is again a postscript file, maybe containing multiple pages together building the poster. The output pages bear cutmarks and have slightly overlapping images for easier assembling. The input picture will be scaled to obtain the desired size.

The program uses a brute-force method: it copies the entire input file for each output page, hence the output file can be very large. Since the program does not really bother about the input file contents, it clearly works for both black- and-white and color postscript.

To control its operation, you need to specify either the size of the desired poster or a scale factor for the image:

- Given the poster size, it calculates the required number of sheets to print on, and from that a scale factor to fill these sheets optimally with the input image.

- Given a scale factor, it derives the required number of pages from the input image size, and positions the scaled image centered on this area.

Its input file should best be a real `Encapsulated Postscript' file (often denoted with the extension .eps or .epsf). Such files can be generated from about all current drawing applications, and text processors like Word, Interleaf and Framemaker.
However poster tries to behave properly also on more relaxed, general postscript files containing a single page definition. Proper operation is obtained for instance on pages generated by (La)TeX and (g)troff.

The media to print on can be selected independently from the input image size and/or the poster size. Poster will determine by itself whether it is beneficial to rotate the output image on the media.

To preview the output results of poster and/or to (re-)print individual output pages, you should use a postscript previewer like ghostview(1).

This program has been around for a while (1995 maybe?) and it doesn't seem to have a website or anything, but this is the latest version I can find and the one that I've been using. This is a rpm for Fedora 33, but I compiled it on Centos 8 with no issues at all. The only change I made was to change the default media size to letter instead of A4, though you can specify the output media size on the command line if you wish.

What it does is take a single-page postscript file and blow it up into multiple pages that you can then assemble like a jigsaw puzzle and create a poster of any size you want.

I just made up some text with libreoffice and then used it to create a 3x3 letter size sheets (9 pages) poster and it looks pretty good.

The next time I need to create a do-it-yourself poster to put in the window here I think I'll try it this way rather than just scrawling something onto the back of an old movie poster with a sharpie marker.

[Bobby Henderson]

Adobe InDesign has the ability to create layouts of multiple pages of different sizes and different aspect ratios using Liquid Layout Page Rules. But the approach is not at all a panacea for making one ad layout fit all possibilities.

Movie marketing has a huge range of advertising platforms with a wide variety of ad layouts in each platform. For instance, the content included on a 41" X 27" one sheet poster as well as the layout itself would not work at all on a 48' X 14' billboard next to a freeway. Both the ad content and composition have to be fine-tuned in both cases. Then there's all the tiny advertising we see on web pages, social media outlets, etc. That content has to be tailored as well.

I think it's possible to take the content of a 41" X 27" one sheet and automatically re-arrange it for different size/shape posters, such as the larger posters I've seen at bus stops or inside the NYC Subway system station and corridors. Still, one would have to start out with things like background imagery built to accommodate the different aspect ratios and sizes. Lettering and logos are usually vector-based objects and can be scaled up and down in size without any loss of quality. Still, the question remains how much time would have to be spent writing code or at least setting up liquid page layout rules versus someone just composing the poster layouts manually.

InDesign can output in both EPS and PDF. The PDF format has considerably more creative capability. If I design graphics in Illustrator and/or Photoshop using certain effects and features I end up having to generate PDF files rather than EPS to send to our large format RIP applications.