21.11.08
Postscript Posters
One of the more exciting things you can do with Postscript is to make a poster -- vector graphics are sexy and you can easily make them as large or small as you want while the plotter or viewing device faithfully retains the original image's sharpness and definition. And bigger is always better: Why make a Rhode Island-sized poster when you can have Texas for the cost of a scaling factor?
I set out to make a poster and found that although it was ultimately a straightforward task, I had to figure a few things out to get it to work.
First, it was necessary for me to write the whole poster on a single 8.5x11 sheet. Apparently it is very hard to change the page size in postscript, so sticking with the default and specifying an appropriate bounding box worked best for me. The bounding box is done up by writing near the top of the file
%%BoundingBox: x1 y1 x2 y2
So, you specify the lower-left and upper-right corners of the smallest rectangle that includes everything you want to be in the image.
I set out to make a poster and found that although it was ultimately a straightforward task, I had to figure a few things out to get it to work.
First, it was necessary for me to write the whole poster on a single 8.5x11 sheet. Apparently it is very hard to change the page size in postscript, so sticking with the default and specifying an appropriate bounding box worked best for me. The bounding box is done up by writing near the top of the file
%%BoundingBox: x1 y1 x2 y2
So, you specify the lower-left and upper-right corners of the smallest rectangle that includes everything you want to be in the image.
On my first try I simply drew my graphics at the intended poster size on the page -- all that was visible to me was the bottom corner of the page, while the majority of the graphics were plotted at coordinates not within the page size.
Once I had everything looking the way I wanted it to I just had to issue the scale commands at the beginning of the file:
.15 .15 scale
caused the graphics to follow to be drawn at the fifteen percent required to get them on the page.
At that point I used the "poster" utility with a scaling factor of the inverse of the one I supplied to postscript -- here, 6.667 -- and piped the output to a new ps file. The new ps file went to ps2pdf, and the final product was the poster at the size I needed split over 40 8.5x11 pages. Cool beans!
Ultimately I decided that what I did want was a whole poster and they are not that expensive so I will take the downscaled pdf to Kinko's and have them upscale it to poster size and print it for me.
Making posters is pretty cool and I think you should try it too.
Labels: jws, postscript
posted by Jonathan Wesley Stone # 14:56 
