plakativ

Plakativ is German for "striking" or "eye-catching" and comes from the German word "Plakat" which means poster in English.

This software allows one to stretch a PDF document across multiple pages that can then be printed on a common inkjet printer, cut and glued together into a larger poster.

Demo

[//]: # To make a new Video, run: [//]: # [//]: # ffmpeg -f x11grab -framerate 30 -video_size 800x600 -i :0.0+41,46 -preset ultrafast -c:v libx264 -crf 0 out.mp4 [//]: # ffmpeg -i out.mp4 -ss 00:00:04.000 -r 2.5 plakativ%04d.png [//]: # convert -loop 0 plakativ*.png +map -layers Optimize plakativ.gif [//]: # gifsicle -b -O3 plakativ.gif

Features

Plakativ allows one to make posters with three different goals in mind:

I want a poster of size X
I want a poster X times the input page size
I have X pages of paper and want to print the biggest possible poster on them

In contrast to other solutions, plakativ tries hard to find a page configuration that wastes as little paper as possible, offering three different layouter algorithms.

TODO

While basic functionality is implemented, lots of work remains to be done:

help button
print poster borders
print cutting guides
changing units
changing language
adding advanced and complex layouters
make PyMuPDF dependency optional
optionally, use pdfrw and/or pypdf2 to read/write PDF
improve command line interface
improve module interface

Comparison to PosteRazor

http://posterazor.sourceforge.net/

PosteRazor served as the inspiration for this software. But in contrast to PosteRazor, plakativ allows PDF documents as input and outputs PDF document with the exact same quality as the input. It is thus not necessary anymore to first do a lossy rasterization of an input PDF so that one can work with PosteRazor.

Comparison to pdfposter

https://pdfposter.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

no GUI
cumbersome box definition
no page borders for glueing
superfluous empty pages
only very simple layouter

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