FC17 PdfPoster does not respect printable area and home page has gone away
 

I am trying to use PdfPoster to scale a large PDF down to a single A4 sheet, but it is not allowing me to specify the printable area of the page and it is not respecting printer margins, so the output is being cropped by the printer. The output is created OK, but the image is sized to the edges of the paper, not the printable area.

I believe there is a patch that allows the user to specify overlap margins, but the home page is no longer functioning.

Is PdfPoster still supported? It is a current Fedora package up to FC18 (on my FC17 system, yum reports 'Package pdfposter-0.5.0-9.fc17.noarch already installed and latest version').

Is the patch to allow the user to specify overlap or margins available anywhere other than the non-functioning home page?

Is there a better solution to my problem?

Any help would be appreciated.

you do not need pdfposter for that.
What is the original size?
dvips does it this way:
http://tug.org/pracjourn/2008-3/morales/morales.pdf

why not just use Gimp
The Gimp opens and prints PDF's just fine

then in Gutenprint just set the size

amani, thank you for the suggestion. I regret I am not a Latex user. dvips looks interesting, but I am starting with a PDF file, not ps.

John VV, yes, Gimp allows me to import the PDF, but text and graphics are rasterised, leaving the page badly pixellated.

Here is the actual problem:
I use FreeMind as my mind mapping tool. I have never had a problem printing a map, until I went to FC17 and installed a Brother MFC7360N using Brother's Linux printer driver. Now, when I attempt to print a mind map, it looks good in the print preview, but the printed output is shifted to the right, such that what should be the left side of the image prints in the middle of the page and the right half of the image is wrapped so that it occupies the left side of the page.

If I print to the CUPS-PDF 'printer' from FreeMind, the resulting PDF has the image placed correctly and margins are provided, so I can open the PDF in Evince and it can be printed successfully. The CUPS-PDF printer does not allow the user to specify the output location, or file name, so I have to go looking for the file. I have set the .ppt file so that output goes to a special directory I have set up under my ~home. This way of working is acceptable, but I am looking at alternatives.

If I tell FreeMind to export my map as a PDF, the result is a file in which the bounding box of the map becomes the size of the image and no margins are allowed for. Printing this file from Evince causes the edges to be cropped, due to the printable area of my printer not extending to the edges of the paper. This occurs even if I tell Evince to 'Shrink to printable area' and 'Auto Rotate and Center'. Puzzling. If I open the exported PDF under LibreOffice Draw and use Print Preview, the image still is placed at the extreme Top and Left edges of the page, without respecting any margins. At least LO Draw renders the PDF using vector graphics, so that is better than Gimp.

If I export my map from FreeMind as an SVG file, Gimp renders the text and graphics as vectors, so the print quality is not compromised. This is the only way I can use Gimp and get a satisfactory result.

So, I am encountering a bug in either FreeMind, or the the way it interacts with the Brother printer driver, causing maps to be right-shifted on the printed page. I also think there may be a bug in Evince that allows me to request the output be sized to the printable area, but this is not being respected. Why the FreeMind print preview looks OK, but the output does not, has me baffled. I thought 'Print Preview' and 'Print' used the same rendering engine, but I am obviously wrong. My work-around is to either print to CUPS-PDF (the easy solution), or Export to SVG and print from Gimp (the hammer cracking the nut solution).

I have not yet raised these issues with any of the affected projects, as I am not sure what is going wrong. No other package has difficulties using the Brother printer, so I don't think it is their problem.