On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Hans Hagen wrote:
not that any people use magnification, it was needed in the bitmap times to get a bigger output but still in good quality; with todays outlines and fit to paper options of printer drivers ... no need for such thing
It's one robust way to make big posters with pdftex. Just do the poster layout on a smaller design page (e. g. 250mm * 350mm, maybe multi columns, grid) where the 10/11/12pt fonts (even math) work right natively without any font size tuning. Then at the document begin: 1. Calculate all page dimensions non-true, 2. set \mag, and 3. reset page dimensions to true dimens --- and you get a big poster, with fonts correctly scaled. One-file/one-step process, no PDF embedding step for ximage magnification required. Also get a small handout version fitting to A4, if \mag < 1000. Even with clickable links, which is not yet possible with pdfximage (pdfpages package)! Alternative would be poster macro packages, where all fonts are scaled in the macro package relative to the final poster size, IMHO not flexible for new fonts, much more work than just let pdftex recalculate a few page related dimensions. Regards, Hartmut