[Qgis-user] Large Format Printing (A0)

[Craig Leat]

Hi

Sorry Tim if I have high-jacked your thread :) Some of the comments
made caused me to experiment with GhostScript and I have just produced
a successful A0 plot of some orthophotos.

We have a plain DesignJet 500 without the ps interpreter and my work
flow up to now has been to generate a pdf in the QGIS Print Composer
on Ubuntu and print this using Adobe Reader on Windows and the HP
printer driver. This approach has not worked well as Adobe takes
forever to process the print job and effectively locks down the pc so
that it cannot be used for anything else while it's busy.

My recent experiment was to generate a ps file in Print Composer and
use GhostScript with the cdnj500 device to produce a preprocessed
binary file ready for the plotter. The preprocessing step with
GhostScript was very quick and I then sent the binary file (375Mb) to
the plotter directly with very pleasing results.

Regards

Craig

PS I needed to build GhostScript from source to enable the cdnj500 device.
PPS I suspect newer plotters may not be supported by GS yet and so
shelling out the extra cash and buying a model with a ps interpreter
may be worthwhile.