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making poster-sized output

Ploticus may be used to produce large-size posters. This involves scaling everything up, and often, rendering on multiple sheets of paper that the user then lays together.

Large-size posters

Large-size paper results suitable for use with posters and presentations can be produced using standard printers and standard sized paper. The result can span any number of sheets of paper. To do this, pl is run multiple times, each time using a different -posteroffset option value. Paginated postscript mode should be used (-ps), and usually the -scale option is used to enlarge the image. After printing, the sheets of paper must be trimmed and then assembled next to one another, using care to trim off any overlap.

Here's a description of the -posteroffset arg:

-posteroffset     x,y

Allows production of large-size posters made up of multiple standard sheets of paper butted together. May be used only with paginated PostScript, and should be used in combination with the -scale and -textsize options. x,y is the point within your result (in absolute units ) that is to be placed at the lower left corner of the page. For further discussion of this, see posters .

Supported printer languages

Paginated PostScript. Use the -ps command line option to produce paginated postscript, which may be sent directly to a PostScript printer.

Example

Example: suppose you want to produce large output for a poster using the gallery example propbars1 (shown). You want to enlarge it to fill 4 sheets of paper (2 x 2). In order to do this, invoke pl four times, once for each sheet.

The following shell script should do the trick..

# Do the lower-left page..
pl -ps propbars1.htm -scale 4 -posteroffset 0,0 | lp

# Do the upper-left..
pl -ps propbars1.htm -scale 4 -posteroffset 0,7.5 | lp

# Do the upper-right..
pl -ps propbars1.htm -scale 4 -posteroffset 10,7.5 | lp

# Do the lower-right..
pl -ps propbars1.htm -scale 4 -posteroffset 10,0 | lp

The last step in the process is to trim each page with a paper cutter and join the sheets together.

Notes

In the above example, poster offsets of 7.5 x 10 are used instead of 8.5 x 11 (inches) in order to leave sufficient margin, since most printers cannot print to the full 8.5 x 11 area.

The -landscape or -poster command line options may be useful when enlarging.

This example shows the Postscript output being piped to the Solaris lp print spooler; use the print spooler for your system.

The -scale option will increase or decrease the location of drawn lines, as well as the thickness of lines and the size of text. Text size often does not scale up as desired; that is why it may be overridden on the command line as in the above example.

Previewing the Postscript that is produced when using -posteroffset may be confusing, since the postscript is not clipped. Clipping is done by the printer.