I visited Bill Symes today to learn how to make 
these beautiful posters. At Trip they use framemaker
to put the poster together. They write their text 
directly in framemaker and import graphics as needed. 
Then they safe the document as a encapsulated postscript
and send it to their plotter. 

Problem: Framemaker seems to be a pain (Bill and I could 
not make it behave today) and I wanted to use TeX and 
all the stuff we are used to. 

Here is what I did:

I created a LaTeX style file, poster.sty. 
The style file places your text into a single, well-proportioned column. 
(You can see the file below). 
it is a copy of Jon's slide style file, jslide.sty, 
without textheight restriction. 

To have a single source file to have poster and slides, you only need 
to comment out the newpage command in your tex files. 
Slides and posters have much in common and I intend to make both 
outputs from the same input in the future. 
A simple makefile change from LATOPTS=poster to LATOPTS=jslide 
will make slides from the same TeX source file. 
SEP's LaTeX works like a charm.

To place the columns next to each other and to enlarge them, 
I used a program <TT>pstops</TT> that is available on SEP's 
Linux machines and on Trip's SUNs. 

For a 8 page document to make 2 pages with 4 subpages in column order: 
<PRE>
  1 3      5 6
  2 4      7 8 
</PRE>
you invoke pstops as 
<PRE>
  pstops "4:0(0.in,0.in)+1(5.in,0.in)+2(10.in,0.in)+3(15.in,0.in)" -h10.in -w20.in in.ps out.ps
</PRE>

To scale by two and to double the size of the output: 
possibly scale by two and choose double the size of the output. (Not sure if
you need to multiply bounding box by xval=612*4*2 yval=792*2)

<PRE>
  pstops "4:0@2(0.in,0.in)+1@2(10.in,0.in)+2@2(20.in,0.in)+3@2(30.in,0.in)" -h20.in -w40.in in.ps out.ps
</PRE>

Afterwards you may have to change the bounding box information. 
The standard US letter bounding box is <TT>0 0 612 792</TT>. 
For the example above you may have to change it to <TT>0 0 1224  3168</TT>
where xval=612*2*2 and yval=792*2*2 (2 for resize, 2 for two pages next to 
each other).

You can view your result using ghostview. You have to change the 
ghostview Media setting to Ledger (see menu on the left) to see 
as much of your poster as possible. I bet there is a ghostview 
setting that lets you scroll over your entire poster but I do not 
know what it is. 

Finally, you can send your ouput to the plotter with a simple 
<TT>lpr -Pplottername out.ps</TT>.

Related programs (See man pages): 
<TT>dvips -E</TT> creates encapsulated postsrcipt from TeX document. 
<TT>epsffit</TT> fits bounding box to ps image. 
<TT>psnup</TT> splits pages into single pages. 
<TT>psselect</TT> selects individual postscript pages from multi-page document.
<TT>psresize</TT> resize document (Alternatively, you can put simply a 
	a postscript scale command at the first line of your file.
	<TT>2 2 scale</TT> doubles the size in x and y direction. 

<H3>Poster Latex style file</H3> 
<PP>
1252 konocti> more /usr/local/share/TEX/teTeX/texmf/tex/latex/sepusers/matt/mposter.sty
\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{mposter}[1998/02/25 v0.1 variation of jonslide in LaTeX2e]

\pagestyle{plain}
\thispagestyle{plain}

\setlength{\textwidth}{4in}
%\setlength{\textheight}{5.5in}

\setlength{\topmargin}{0in}
\setlength{\headheight}{0in}
\setlength{\headsep}{0in}
\setlength{\topskip}{0in}
\setlength{\footskip}{0in}
</PP>