The poster text is typeset inside a colored box of specified width and height, with an empty surrounding margin, a colored border, and an inner border margin.
The text area has a width of (boxwidth - 2*marginwidth - 2*borderwidth - 2*bordermargin), and a height of (boxheight - 2*marginwidth - 2*borderwidth - 2*bordermargin).
When landscape orientation is chosen, poster text will be rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, so that it runs from bottom to top. The width and height of the poster box are not affected by this.
The current implementation (in awk) requires options to begin with a `+', rather than the conventional `-', so as to distinguish them from nawk(1) options.
Color values can be specified as any named X Window System color, or red/green/blue values in 0..1 separated by characters other than digits or period. E.g. 0/1/0 is green, and 0.5:0.5:0.5 is 50% gray. Letter case in color names is not significant.
Dimensions consist of a (possibly signed) number followed by a TeX dimension unit: bp (big points), cc (ciceros), cm (centimeters), dd (didot points), in (inches), mm (millimeters), pc (picas), pt (points), or sp (scaled points). E.g. 72bp, 2.54cm, 67.542dd, 1in, 25.4mm, 6.023pc, 72.27pt, and 4736286.72sp all specify a dimension of one inch. PostScript uses big points as its default units, and its documentation refers to them as points.
Poster text is given either as separate arguments on the command line, or as separate lines of a file supplied on standard input. Multiple-word arguments must be quoted or their spaces escaped to be properly recognized.
Most PostScript printers contain a number of resident fonts, but only a small number of downloadable Type 1 PostScript fonts are available without a font license, notably Adobe Courier and Utopia, Bitstream Charter and Courier, and URW Antiqua, Grotesk, and Nimbus. These three vendors have generously made these fonts available for free distribution, but retain the copyrights. More than 2300 fonts are listed in the afmfonts.map file (see the \s-2ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES\s+2 section below), but only a very small number are likely to be available at a given site.
On a UNIX system, you can list the downloadable fonts available at your site by grep /FontName /usr/local/lib/afm/*.pfa, assuming that /usr/local/lib/afm is where they reside.
For a list of printer resident fonts, consult your printer documentation, or print the small PostScript file, fontlist.ps, that is distributed with psposter. For convenience, that file is reproduced here; you can adjust PointSize, ColumnWidth, and the default display font (Courier) if you wish:
%!
% fontlist.ps
% Send this file to a PostScript device to list
% the names of all of the resident fonts.
% [13-Dec-1994]
/inch { 72 mul } def
/PointSize 10 def
/ColumnWidth 3 inch def
/Courier findfont PointSize scalefont setfont
/n 0 def
/newcolumn
{
/x x ColumnWidth add def
x y moveto
8 inch x gt { showpage newpage } if
} def
/newpage
{
/x 1 inch def
/y 10 inch def
x y moveto
} def
/nstr 10 string def
/scratch 256 string def
newpage
(*)
{
/n n 1 add def
gsave
n nstr cvs show
(: ) show
show
grestore
0 PointSize -1.2 mul rmoveto
currentpoint exch pop 1 inch lt
{
newcolumn
} if
}
scratch /Font resourceforall
showpage
Any poster text outside the text frame is clipped, and not displayed. Default: automatically set.
In addition to the standard sizes, any particular size can be requested by giving it in the form widthxheight, e.g. 8.5inx11in or 210mmx297mm.
Default: installation dependent: usually A (in the USA) and A4 (elsewhere).
The table title includes the font size and name. The title, and the row/column labels, are always set in black Times-BoldItalic text.
Unless an explicit +p dimension option is provided, the font size is automatically adjusted to an integer value that maximizes table size.
Default: no font table.
psposter Chemistry 101 Examination 1:00pm--3:00pm | lpr
Make a door sign in landscape mode:
psposter +l +w 10cm +h 25cm 'Prof. Jane Smith' >doorsign.ps
Print the same sign, in color:
psposter +l +w 10cm +h 25cm +bd blue +bg skyblue \
+fg navyblue 'Prof. Jane Smith' | lpr
If a PostScript printer is incapable of printing in
color, it will simulate color by shades of gray.
Make a sale sign:
psposter +bg yellow <<END-OF-DATA >yardsale.ps Terrific Yard Sale Today 123 Elm St. END-OF-DATA
Make a seminar announcement:
psposter +bg orange <<EOF >seminar.ps Biology Colloquium Friday 23-Sep-1994 3pm--4pm LSB 234 Dr. Judith Brown Sex Life of Gnats EOF
Make a Danish road sign (the octal escape sequences select the letters AE and o-slash; see Appendix E of the PostScript Language Reference Manual, Addison-Wesley, 1990, ISBN 0-201-18127-4):
psposter +bg yellow +fg black '\341resk\371bing' 5km >vejskilt.ps
Make another road sign in a downloaded font, supplying one leading and trailing blank on each line:
psposter +bg green +fg white +fn URWGroteskT-Bold +r -90 \
' Green River ' ' 106 miles ' >roadsign.ps
(The stretch of highway I-70 in Utah from Salina
to Green River is claimed to be the longest in the
US Interstate Highway System without services.)
Make a poster showing the dingbat font layout:
psposter +fn ZapfDingbats +table 8/o >dingbats.ps
On UNIX, the search path is a colon-separated list of directories. On other operating systems, the search path follows the conventions of those systems.
Typical lines in afmfonts.map look like this:
% This line is a comment. % This font name is too long for some % operating systems, so we store it under a % shorter name. The font files will be % HelvNaBI.afm, containing the character % metrics (assorted dimensions), and % HelvNaBI.pfa (ASCII) or HelvNaBI.pfb % (binary), containing encrypted PostScript % definitions of the character shapes. Helvetica-Narrow-BoldOblique = HelvNaBI
Typical lines in rgb.txt look like this:
000 000 000 black 000 000 255 blue 000 255 000 green 000 255 255 cyan 255 000 000 red 255 000 255 magenta 255 255 000 yellow 255 255 255 white 250 235 215 antique white 250 235 215 AntiqueWhite
There is no comment syntax.
The first three numbers define red, green, and blue intensities on a scale of 0..255, and the remaining text on each line is the color name, which, in the case of compound color names, appears in two forms, one in lower case with blank separators, and one without blanks, in mixed case.
Nelson H. F. Beebe, Ph.D. Center for Scientific Computing Department of Mathematics University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112 Tel: +1 801 581 5254 FAX: +1 801 581 4148 Email: <beebe@math.utah.edu>
ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/misc/psposter-0.08.tar.z ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/misc/psposter-0.08.zip ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/misc/psposter-0.08.zoo