I needed an A0 poster of the USA for a family quiz and was a bit worried as to how I was going to go about it.The first problem would be getting an vector image given that a bitmap image would not scale well. Then the problem of how to get it printed on a big A0 sheet. (Approx 16 A4/Letter pages)
Well the first hit for "vector map usa" was http://cardhouse.com/design/free/usa.htm who has a nice map without text. The map data is public domain and was taken from the CIA. So far so good.
Next I wanted a way to print out the map on 16 A4 pages so I could stick them together to make one big A0 poster. Well a few weeks ago I heard on the http://www.validsyntax.com/ podcast about a program called posterazor but when I searched through the kubuntu repositories I found a nice command line program "poster" by Jos van Eijndhoven that did the same thing.
When I printed out the poster the orientation was wrong and I wanted to edit it out so only the states under Canada were visible so I needed to be able to edit the eps files. I could have opened the file directly in Inkscape but I chose to convert the file to svg first following the instructions on Zoltans Blogg . I modified the image in Inkscape and saved it as a new .eps file and then used poster to create a 16 page bigger version. I printed that big file using KGhostView. Here’s the summary:
wget http://cardhouse.com/design/free/usanotext.zip
unzip usanotext.zip
poster -v -iA4 -mA4 -pA0 usanotextfinal2005.eps > usanotextfinal2005A0.eps
pstoedit -dt -f sk usanotextfinal2005.eps usanotextfinal2005.sk
skconvert usanotextfinal2005.sk usanotextfinal2005.svg
inkscape usanotextfinal2005.svg
poster -v -iA4 -mA4 -pA0 usanotextfinal2005-edited-in-inkscape.eps > usanotextfinal2005A0.eps
kghostview usanotextfinal2005A0.eps