Software Review Posterazor For Printing Posters

Here's a quick, easy way to print out posters from your computer. Posterazor is the perfect software solution for poster printing. If you've used The Rasterbator online, this is pretty similar but you don't have to be online to use it. Now you can print out great looking posters from home, the office or anywhere you don't have an internet connection.

So I use this personally for promo posters for my business. I have printed out a couple decorative poster art type projects, but my main use is for window posters to promote sale items. This program lets you print out an image over multiple pages of paper so you can tape or collage them together to make one large poster. Here's an example of a Valentine's Day poster I made for a friend.

Valentine's Day sale poster made with some clipart, and 4 pages of paper.

I use Fedora so I did  a yum search and I found it available in the repositories. yum install posterazor and yum did the rest. Using the program is pretty simple as well. Basically for my project I created a 6900 x 3600 pixel file in Gimp 2.8. Chose my font, added some clipart and exported the file as a jpg image.

Designed in Gimp 2.8 at 6900 x 3600 pixels and exported as jpg.

 Next you open Posterazor.Click on the folder icon over on the right hand side where it says input image. Find the directory where you saved the file you created and open it in The Posterazor, when the file opens click the next button over on the bottom right hand corner. You can click the images in this blog post to enlarge them for a better view.

Step 1 of The Posterazor. Select the image you want to turn into a poster.

 During step 2 I kept everything on the default settings. This more or less controls your borders. You can play around with this a bit on your own. I just left it at default and cut the borders on one page so they overlapped a bit and had some room to tape. I found this easier for me. Again click next.

In step 2 I left everything set at the defaults.

Step 3 lets you adjust the overlapping of the pages. Again I left this on the default setting and clicked next.

Step 3 controls the overlapping, again I left this set at the defaults.

Step 4 shows you how the pages will print, and how many pages you will be using. You can adjust this to make your poster larger or smaller. I wanted mine to be about 4 pages, landscaped, to place in the storefront windor. So I created it at 2 pages width, and 1.5 page height. Click next.

Step 4 shows you how many pages you'll be printing. This can be adjusted to add more or less pages depending on the size of the poster desired.

 Step 5 click on the floppy disk icon under where it says save the poster. Choose the directory you want to save it in, name the file and give it a pdf extension. Press the OK button and your pretty much done.

Click on the floppy disk icon, name the file and give it a pdf extension.

All you have to do now is open up the pdf file, click print, and your printer will do the rest. Trim the edges, I trim the edges on one side and tape it on the back. I think it looks neater and hides the tape for the most part.

Open the pdf file in your favorite pdf viewer. I used Okular. The image will be broken up in page sections. Click print, and tape your pages together, you have acheived poster !

Whatever you decide to use the Posterazor for, this is a great piece of software, that's fun and easy to use. Makes great posters in 6 easy steps ! This is perfect for creating promo posters for the store window at work ! If you've used this program leave a comment and tell me what you've used it for.

10 Months Using Linux and 2014 Update

Wow, time can really fly by ! After going through my notes it seems I've been running my Fedora machine for 10 months now as a full time Linux user. No Windows, strictly Fedora 19. I can honestly say I'm not missing Windows at all. It seems like just yesterday I deleted my Windows 7 partition, formatted the drive and installed Fedora.

Over the last 10 months I really haven't had any problems or complaints about giving up Windows. No major problems using Linux, and things seem to of gone more smoothly then I would of imagined.

One of the things that made me hesitant about becoming a full time Fedora user was that I thought I would be giving up or losing a lot when it came to software choices. It turns out that this has not been my experience at all. As a matter of fact, I've found that by switching to Linux full time I seem to have more choices for what I do and 9 out of 10 times like the Linux version better than the Windows comparable product.

 What I'm Currently Using.

For example my amateur photography work. I gave up Photoshop, and now use Gimp 2.8 , UFRaw, and Darktable. Just about everything I was using Photoshop for, I've found I can do in Gimp 2.8 and when working with RAW files Darktable has been great.

Browsing the web hasn't changed at all. I still use Firefox, Chrome, and FTP with Filezilla.

For my multimedia projects K3B took some learning but once you figure it out blows away anything that I used on Windows for burning music and data cd's.

I've come to really love LibreOffice and in my opinion find it to be just as good as MSOffice. Again, I did have to read a little and learn some of the different functions, but in the end it did exactly what I needed it to do !

For my web design projects I've been using Quanta and Gedit with much delight. Gedit is a really great text editor in my opinion perfect for coding CSS and HTML.

All and all I couldn't be happier making the switch. Everything has worked out great !

What I've Given Up.

I really haven't given up a lot switching to a GNU/Linux based O.S.  I've never been a big fan of gaming, so that hasn't been a problem for me. Although from what I understand , Linux gaming is also starting to come a long way. I've given up one multi player online game. I also DJ, and haven't been able to find a program to run my Hercules MP3 mixer.

Mixx is available for MP3 mixers but at the time of my research Hercules wasn't supported. I spent an afternoon trying to set a configuration for it manually with very limited results. With that said, so far that has been the only thing that I haven't been able to do with my Fedora box that I could with Windows ! Not a major loss but I do have to admit, I miss creating the occasional House and Breakbeat mix from time to time.

Things I've Discovered In 2013 

and 

Future Projects For 2014

Over the course of 2013 I took an old VHS video collection I had and converted it to MP4 . I did this with a really cheap video capture dongle I purchased on Amazon for $9.95.  It took a minute to configure, but it worked great. Then after doing some experimenting I plugged my satellite receiver into the video capture dongle and used my laptop as a TV / DVR . I was really surprised with the results considering the entire project costed me under $15.00 with parts.

Based on the results of that experiment, I'm thinking about building a cheap GNU/Linux based home entertainment P.C. for the home. I just purchased a new monitor, and I'm looking into building a P.C. box , use a Linux based O.S. and see if I can keep the entire project under a couple hundred dollars. I'll be posting the results here and update frequently.

                                  Finally 

I started the year off with a really bad case of the flu. I had big plans for 2014, and planned on starting the year off full steam ahead. That didn't happen. Today was the first day in about 3 weeks that I felt like busting out the computer and doing some serious work. I ALWAYS HAVE A COMPUTER BY ME. So I was really sick, and actually bed ridden :-(

I had a bunch of different blogs and projects that I was working on in 2013, and decided that this year I was going to trim the fat, and only work on the the projects I was really enjoying. I decided to keep this blog, my amateur photography blog, and The Design Blog@New Aeon Design. So expect a lot more posting here for 2014. I'm also planning on getting more into Command Line stuff as I find myself using the command line more and more now.

One of the other things I'm thinking about changing in 2014 is the distro. I've used Fedora for close to a year now, but I'm thinking about looking into some of the other GNU/Linux based distros available now. This blog is somewhat Fedora Centric for lack of a better word, and I would like it to become more of a general use Linux blog not really based on any particular distro. As much as I love Fedora I think it's time to test the waters with some of the other distros available. With that said "Thanks Fedora for a really pleasant user experience in 2013 !"

Thanks for following, if you made it this far, thanks for reading this long winded post. Hopefully you found it helpful. If you're considering switching over to a GNU / Linux based O.S. and found this post I hope it helps you make the right decision based on your needs. If you're not a die hard gamer, take the plunge into the world of full time Linux users , with a little time and practice I think you'll be happy with the decision you made !

Wishing you all a prosperous and productive new year. Thanks from New Aeon Design, and Notes On Using Linux !