[cl-typesetting-devel] making a huge poster with cl-typesetting

[Marc Battyani]

"Chisheng Huang" <cph at chi-square-works.com> wrote:

> I'd like to make a poster of many (3 ~ 6) columns of text and graphics.
> Is this possible with CL-TYPESETTING?

No problem. David J Cooper Jr used cl-typesetting and cl-pdf to typeset a
nice GDL pamphlet.
Here it is:
http://www.genworks.com/downloads/gdl-pamphlet-portrait.pdf

> I just started poking around
> in the source code of CL-TYPESETTING.  There are 3 issues that pop up
> in my mind:
>   1. I think I'll have to add an entry to the definition of +PAGER-SIZES+
>      to generate a poster bigger than the A0 size.
>   2. I'm not sure how to get the multicolumn format I need.  There are
TABLE,
>      ROW, and CELL in CL-TYPESETTING but I need the text to flow from the
>      bottom of a column to the top of the next column to the right.

For 1 and 2: You can't use the top level functions for generating a document
as they don't support multi-columns yet. You have to manually call
draw-block with your columns coordinates as shown in full-example in
test.lisp (where I have 4 columns on the first page). Tables are not usable
because you want the text to overflow from a columns to the next one.

>   3. All my graphics stuff is generated by CL-PDF separately.  Any way to
>      import these PDF files into a PDF file (the poster being generated by
>      CL-TYPESETTING)?

Not yet. The best way for now is to directly call the cl-pdf generating
function directly like it's done in the examples.

> If you can shed any light on any one of the above issues, I'll be very
> grateful.

> -cph, back to poke around in the CL-PDF/CL-TYPESETTING src code.

Great!

Marc