Making posters with PosteRazor

I had to create a huge poster out of an image. The normal way you do that is to somehow prepare many DIN A4 sheets, so you have to enlarge a given image, cut it into many pieces, probably add some padding and if you’re lucky, you get your PDFs you can print.

But how do you actually do this? I used to use psresize and friends because I just wasn’t aware of anything more useful. Of course, dealing with psresize, psnup etc wasn’t very comfortable and I rarely was successful. I remember that I’ve asked a friend of mine to do it for me several times in the past. He owned a Mac and it was rather comfortable with those authoring tools. I began using OpenOffice to create those posters, but it really is uncomfortable: You have to remember which cutout you’ve used in the previous page, then move the image within the page and hope that you match the previous page. Needless to say, that this takes a considerable amount of time.

I always wanted to have  a tool which works like this: makeposter --format=DINA0 < input.png > poster.pdf It would scale the image, cut it, add padding for glueing and produce several pages in a single PDF.

I now was told about PosteRazor! An incredibly useful tool to do more or less the stuff I want. It is free software and pretty easy to use. It uses neither Gtk+ nor Qt. Instead, Fulltick is used to build the GUI. I have never heard of it, but it’s okay. The widgets are not as beautiful as Gtk’s and the filechooser is especially bad, but the rest seems to be fine. So it serves almost every need I have 🙂

Awesome, isn’t it? I mean not just that it’s really easy, and you have your own poster in five minutes including printing! They even have extremely good marketing! 🙂

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.