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I use beamerposter with pdfLateX. I normally make the poster for A0 page size but need to reduce the size of (scale) the poster to a specific width to fit a smaller size frame used for showing posters in our department. I realize I could design the poster for a smaller size but still I need to switch between size. So, is there a simple way to scale the entire poster with its content already when compiling it?

Peter Jansson
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    You may use pdfpages. –  Dec 09 '12 at 12:45
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    Why not just let the printer driver do the job to scale to whatever paper format you have? – Daniel Dec 09 '12 at 14:16
  • True, Daniel! But, in some cases (services outside my control) the digital original has to be submitted to be printed in its final size directly. – Peter Jansson Dec 09 '12 at 14:27
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    @PeterJansson (Message is not related to the present question) When you review first posts, please check for appropriate retagging actions before stating "No action needed". (In the latest question reviewed by you, the [tag:nesting] tag would have been useful.) Many thanks! – lockstep Feb 04 '13 at 16:40
  • @lockstep (message relating only to the comment by lockstep) thanks for the comment and point well taken, however, I experience that the view of what and how things should be tagged differ so there will always be some discrepancies between users. Drop me a mail if you wish, see my profile text. – Peter Jansson Feb 04 '13 at 16:50
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    @PeterJansson Tagging discrepancies are inevitable to some degree, and reviewing does not (and should not) require comprehensive knowledge of existing tags. I pointed out the question at hand because it featured a link to a prior question, which in turn featured the [tag:nesting] tag. ;-) – lockstep Feb 04 '13 at 16:57
  • @lockstep No worries, I just wanted to make sure I was not doing something wrong without knowing it. – Peter Jansson Feb 04 '13 at 16:59

1 Answers1

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As posters are typically printed only once or twice, I would not bother too much about configuring the final page format in the LaTeX source. Instead just post-process the resulting PDF to fit the required paper format.

Many printing systems provide a "scale" or "auto-scale" option to fit some given content to the selected page size. If you have to to specify it manually, you give a scale factor of 1/√2 (0.707) to go down one A paper format.

If you actually do need a pdf of the requested size (because somebody else is going to print it), either "print to PDF" or employ the pdfjam utility:

pdfnup --no-landscape --scale 0.707 --paper a1 poster.pdf

will transform poster.pdf from A0 format into a file poster-nup.pdf in A1 format.

(The pdfjam utility actually does employ LaTeX with the geometry and pdfpages packages to do its job, so you can pass any options that are described in the pdfpages documentation.)

Daniel
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