[PLUG] Thinking outside the--page

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

The other day I wanted to print an image file as a 4x letter size page 
poster.  The Ubuntu 10.04 versions of Geeqie, GThumb, F-Spot, and maybe 
a couple of others failed and I didn't bother with the GIMP.  A trivial 
Google search then led me to http://posterazor.sourceforge.net/ which is 
in the Ubuntu repos, so 'aptitude install posterazor' and I was in business.

The GUI is in "Wizard" form and I found it a bit ugly, but it was 
reasonably intuitive and worked great.  It took probably less than 4 
minutes, from Google to the 4 page print-out in my hand...  That is cool.

But what is even cooler is the brilliant simplicity of this tool.  If I 
understand it correctly (and I've spent no more than the time it took to 
read 
http://posterazor.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=features&lang=english 
thinking about it), all it does is provide a GUI to:
1) Embed an image in a PDF
2) On each page of the PDF, specify a scale and section of the image to 
display

Brilliant!  All of the hard work is done by PDF and the PDF viewer, once 
the GUI writes the simple (well as simple as PDF gets) PDF code.  An 
awesome example of the power of the Unix tools philosophy, applied in a 
non-obvious (to me anyway) space.

How cool is this?
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
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