LWN: Searching for software or having an itch... [LWN.net]

From:		Ewen McNeill <ewen@naos.co.nz>
To:		atorrey@cybercom.net
Subject:		LWN: Searching for software or having an itch...
Date:		Thu, 17 Apr 2003 16:05:20 +1200
Cc:		letters@lwn.net

In a letter to LWN you write:
>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.
>[....]
>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 traditional program for doing this under unix is: banner.

On my Debian Linux system it is in /usr/games/banner, from the package
bsdmainutils.

banner produces large letters in ASCII-art form, ie by drawing them with
ASCII letters. It dates back to the days when line printers were king;
the earliest copyright date in it is 1980.

>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

http://freshmeat.net/

It's not perfect, but it's the closest thing there is to a central catalog,
and generally I've found it useful when I've got a "I need a program to do
this" type query. However sometimes browsing through an appropriate
category is more useful than word-based searching.

In addition to that I use Debian's package repository:

apt-cache search ....

on a debian system; or visit:

http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

and use the search forms there. Debian is useful for this because
they have a lot of free and open source software packaged.

Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/ can also be useful, but only for
the fraction of open source software hosted on SourceForge (maybe 30%-40%
at most).

Google is useful for some things, but you need to be very particular with
your search terms some of the time to narrow the results down to the right
set of things, otherwise as you found you end up with "lots of similar but
not the same thing" hits.

Ewen

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LWN: Searching for software or having an itch...

Posted Apr 24, 2003 1:56 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

For printing, large and small, use GIMP.

It scales to whatever size paper you want, you can select from about 70 pre-set standard page sizes. It optimises for colour/grayscale, line drawing, does orientation etc. etc. etc.

I'm using version 1.3.14, I can't remember what printing was like in the 1.2.x series but it was probably also excellent.

(was 'banner' a joke?)

For software searching, I usually use the Free Software Directory:
http://www.fsf.org/directoy/
(or http://packages.debian.org or egrep my local Packages file)

Hope this helps.
Ciaran O'Riordan

LWN: Searching for software or having an itch...

Posted Apr 24, 2003 4:28 UTC (Thu) by djfoobarmatt (subscriber, #6446) [Link]

The table of equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software in Linux. <http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-lin-soft-en/> - One of the largest difficulties in migrating away from Windows to Linux is the lack of comparable software. Newbies usually search for analogs of Windows software for Linux, and advanced Linux-users cannot answer their questions since they often don't know too much about Windows :). This list of equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software in Linux is based on our own experience and on the information from the visitors of this page (thanks!).

Poster printing

Posted Apr 24, 2003 6:02 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]

OK, since nobody else mentioned it yet, has everyone here forgotten about xfig? I slapped together a few nice looking 11x17 sign a couple of weeks ago with nice big 120 point type on it and our Xerox Docucolor spit out some nice signage.