2014-09-19



I had an A4 page and wanted to have it printed in larger  formats
(A3  and  A2). To do this, the plan was to print several A4 pages
and glue them together afterwards.

There is the tool `poster' for Postscript  files.  It  fits  well
into  the whole toolchest of Postscript utilities that are avail-
able (psnup, psbook, et.al). I like these tools so  much  because
they  form  a  toolchest and they are usually quite small.  So is
poster. It comprises less than 1000  lines  of  C  code.   Unfor-
tunately,  there  appears  to  be some bug in the code: The first
page of the resulting multi-page file is unnecessary but the last
necessary  one is missing. Too bad. The issue was the same when I
compiled a different version from source.

I had no time to dig into the code to fix the  problem.  Maybe  I
should  find  this  time, and learn some more about Postscript on
the way.

Poster is also delighting becaus  it's  man  page  contains  this
pearl:

     -o <outputfile>
         Specify the name of the file to  write  the  output
         into.  (Only added for those poor people who cannot
         specify output redirection from their command  line
         due to a silly OS.)
         Default is writing to standard output.


As an alternative, there is `pdfposter'.

     This is much like poster does for Postscript files, but
     working  with  PDF. [...] Indeed pdfposter was inspired
     by poster.

However, pdfposter is a poor imitate of poster. The  most  impor-
tant function, the cut marks (-c), which are well done in poster,
are completely missing from pdfposter. Thus, if your printer can-
not print up to the edge of the paper, you'll be losing content.


The quality and elegance of  these  Postscript  tools  is  seldom
transferred  to their PDF equivalents. What is the reason? Is PDF
more complex than PS? Are the  developers  worse?  Do  they  care
less?  Or are todays users prefering applications over tools?



http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>