a0poster.sty

Purpose

Printing a poster with TeX and dvips on our DIN A0 printer was quite complicated (inserting lines in the postscript file and so on). The a0poster package makes this easier. Current version is 1.21b. Since I can test only with an HP Designjet 650C I don't know if it works with other printers correctly.

Documentation

There ist an dvi file and this short manual:

You need LaTeX <1995/06/01> and dvips. The two files a0poster.cls and a0size.sty must be copied in a directory where TeX scans for input files.

a0poster is activated simply with \usepackage{a0poster}.

The options:
landscapelandscape format, is default
portraitportrait format
a0b "DIN A0 big" - that's a somewhat widened DIN A0 format that uses the printing width of HP Designjet 650C. That's also default.
a0 DIN A0
a1 DIN A1
a2 DIN A2
a3 DIN A3
draft reduces the postscript output to DIN A4 size, so test printings can be made with ordinary DIN A4 printers.
final makes postscript output in original size; is default.
Then the length and width of the poster is set to reasonable values (so I hope), the headline disappears and the margins were set to 0 in order to make maximum use of the width of our printer.

The following font sizes are available:
\tiny 12pt
\scriptsize 14.4pt
\footnotesize 17.28pt
\small 20.74pt
\normalsize 24.88pt
\large 29.86pt
\Large 35.83pt
\LARGE 43pt
\huge 51.6pt
\Huge 61.92pt
\veryHuge 74.3pt
\VeryHuge 89.16pt
\VERYHuge 107pt

a0poster also takes care that in math formulas the symbols appear in the right size.

With the commands

latex dateiname
dvips dateiname
qprt -PPL dateiname.ps (or other print commands, depending on the system)

you can work and print as usual.

While TeXing a file a0header.ps is created which is read by dvips. This provides that the file is printed in the right size.

For colors, frames and so on I recommend pstricks (see the documentation)