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.

Install Printer HP D110 Fedora 18 KDE Spin

So I got the printer installed on the Dell Inspiron 1501 today. The laptop is running great with Fedora 18 KDE Spin and the printer install went fairly well. I did a test install with Fedora 17 using Gnome and I have to admit the install using Gnome was a bit easier. I ran into a couple problems in KDE getting the built in scanner to work. In Gnome it was almost plug and play.

Running Fedora 18 KDE Spin, I plugged the HP Photosmart D110 usb cable into the usb port and it immediately detected a printer. A window popped up , NEW PRINTER DETECTED, CONFIGURING NEW PRINTER, NO PRINTER DRIVER DETECTED. So I did some research and found the hplip drivers were what I needed to install this printer. I opened up Konsole yum install hplip, unplugged the usb cable, plugged it back in and the drivers were immediately found. Easy enough ! I did a print test, all worked great, I then decided to do a scan test, only to realize I had no scanning software installed. I installed xsane - yum install xsane. Found the program in program launcher under graphics, clicked it and no scanner found :( I read a little more, and it seemed I had all the right drivers and all the right software, so here's what I did to get the scanner working.

I'm not sure if the problem was because I installed xsane after the hplip drivers. So I left xsane alone, and removed hplip yum remove hplip. I then did a yum search hplip and installed yum install hplip.x86_64 and also installed yum install hplip-gui.x86_64. I went back to program launcher, graphics, xsane and the program loaded, detected the scanner with no problems this time , so I threw the printer test page in the scanner and everything worked great ! I then opened another document in libreoffice, hit print and the printer still worked fine. 

Scan of the HP Photosmart D110 print test page. Scanner and printer run great.

When I was playing around with this project in Fedora 17 with Gnome it was almost plug and play. I plugged the usb cable for the HP D110 Photosmart printer into the computer and it detected everything and Gnome already had all the scanning software and everything I needed installed. In KDE it was a little more involved but with a little research I had everything working in under an hour. With the Dell Inspiron 1501 I would still suggest running Fedora 18 KDE Spin. It was a little more involved configuring the printer but KDE seems to run a lot more smoothly than Gnome did in this machine.

On a final note, this computer will not be networked or used on the internet now that I have it configured and all the software I need installed on it. If you're running cups, and printing with your linux computer you may want to look into some of the security issues pertaining to cups. Everything I read about the subject said it is best to avoid this software on any networked or internet ready computer. I may be doing some future posts on cups, and making a more secure environment for printing using Linux. Till next time, thanks for reading !