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Searching for software or having an itch...
Hello, Once again, LWN gets it right in pointing at something I was experiencing just as I was going to write about it anyway... (I have to read a week late due to unemployment = don't spend money that isn't essential) Your pointer to the article "Open Source needs centralized PR, not development (NewsForge)" seemed right on the money, as did the article itself. I just had a need to make a few campaign signs for my effort to get elected to Town Meeting locally. I'm a really lousy artist, so I had the idea of printing out the content of my signs on letter paper using very large type, and either gluing the paper printout onto my poster-board signs, or cutting them out in order to make stencils. I've done similar things at my old job (where the boss made me use M$ products) with no problem, as M$ Word goes up to around 190pt. type (about 6" tall letters) I also have a vague memory of a DOS program that did "ASCII art" banners with different size letters. My girlfriend and I spent a couple of hours searching then, and I've spent several hours since, trying to find a Linux program that would let me do the equivalent, with NO success. None of the Linux word processor or presentation programs seem to come with fonts over 96 points (about 3", or half what I wanted) We couldn't find anything on Google, searching on things like 'Linux Large Fonts' gave lots of advice on changing font size on the video display, but no programs. The Linux equivalency chart referenced in the comments didn't have anything that seemed to fit the description. The Gimp didn't have big fonts available in it's text tool (that I could find). I suspect that it would be possible to get large fonts out of TeX, but we didn't have time for the learning curve that TeX is reputed to require. So I ended up feeling very frustrated, and going back to making the signs from scratch. (They were ugly, but I won the election, which is what counts I guess) I'm not a programmer, I do hardware, not software; so I can't write a program to do this myself. My girlfriend probably could, but she has a 'yellow-dog' employment agreement that says her boss owns her brain 24/7 so she can't work on open source stuff. Besides, I'm SURE there must be a program out there that does this kind of thing IF ONLY WE COULD FIND IT! We have had several other times when we were looking for other applications, and it has consistently been a challenge to find out what options we had to choose from. I never really tried to find stuff for Windows, but back in my DOS BBS days, I never had as much trouble finding (legal) down-loadable software as I do today finding things for Linux on the Internet. I'm not sure what the answer is, but it seems to me like the Open Source world needs a better CENTRAL catalog of available software, or perhaps a "HOWTO" on finding software that lists all the major sites and gives suggestions as to what kind of search strings will be most likely to give good results. ART (Log in to post comments)
Searching for software or having an itch... Posted Apr 17, 2003 1:56 UTC (Thu) by jello (subscriber, #6083) [Link] Did you try just typing in the point size that you wanted, rather than selecting from the list? I just made text with an 850 point font in Gimp and it seemed to work fine.
Searching for software or having an itch... Posted Apr 17, 2003 2:27 UTC (Thu) by mbcook (subscriber, #5517) [Link] There is an ASCII banner program (called "banner" I think. It's usually part of the "bsdtext" or "bsdgames" or "textgames" package on many distros). As for non-ascii, the GIMP can do just about anything. As the comment above me says, the font may not be in the list, but that doesn't mean that the program can't generate a larger number. Just type it in.
Searching for software or having an itch... Posted Apr 17, 2003 17:08 UTC (Thu) by alonzo (subscriber, #2770) [Link] Try:% echo A | nenscript --font=Times-Roman700 and a ~7" 'A' should appear on your printer. I tried 850 but the bottom of it was off the page???
Searching for software or having an itch... Posted Apr 17, 2003 18:08 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] As others have said, type the point size you want rather than looking for it on a list. The list can't include every possible point size, since that's infinite.As for finding software, freshmeat.net is a good place to start, though it's somewhat diluted by non-free and Windows software. Since I run Debian (you could tell by my use of "non-free", couldn't you?), the first thing I do to find software is do "apt-cache search keyword", possibly piped into "grep -i anotherkeyword". Swapping the two keywords will give different results.
Searching for software or having an itch... Posted Apr 24, 2003 8:26 UTC (Thu) by ketil (guest, #8958) [Link] If you can produce your poster as a postscript file, there's a program poster, which lets you print it enlarged on multiple sheets. -kzm
Searching for software or having an itch... Posted Apr 24, 2003 10:10 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link] To me it's obvious that you want to do a Postscript transformation to get whatyou want. Splitting a large print job on smaller papers is after all a common output transformation that should not depend on the program used to type the text. With that knowledge it is a simple matter of googling. (And, after doing just that a couple of times I always keep psutils and poster installed.) I guess the corresponding place in a KDE system (you are running KDE I hope, it's featureful approach is a good fit for home desktops) would be the printing dialog, which is shared for all programs. There seems to be psnup functionality in there but not poster. Let's hope they add that in the future.
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