Here is a hypothesis for what is going on: It's working, doing what it was told to do, but what it was told to do is probably not what is intended.
First, a closer look at the example input PDF shows there is an oddity (not wrong, just odd): $ pdfinfo -box Micro-Magic_Plan_2016_V2.pdf [...] Page size: 2961.3 x 2094.21 pts [...] However, A4 paper is 210 x 297 millimetres, or more to the point here (excuse the pun), 595 x 842 pts. That means the full-sized image is already more than four times as large as a single sheet of A4 paper (portrait, which is the default). Hence, `--scale=4' is going to produce an image that is more than 16x the size of A4 width (and correspondingly as high): $ pdfposter --dry-run --verbose --verbose --verbose --scale=4 Micro-Magic_Plan_2016_V2.pdf /dev/null Mediasize : 1.0x1.0 a4 595.00 842.00 dots Scaling by: 4.000000 ---- processing page 1 ----- input dimensions: 2961.30 2094.21 (trimbox of input page) output dimensions: 11845.20 8376.84 (calculated) Pages w/o rotation 20 x 10 Pages w/ rotation 15 x 15 Decided for rotation: no Deciding for 20 column and 10 row of portrait pages. ^C [...] That's a BIG poster: 20 A4 pages wide (4.2 metres), and 10 A4 pages high (almost 3 metres), on a total of 200 sheets. I'm not surprised it's taking a long time to generate a very large output. (The use of `--dry-run' and `/dev/null' are attempts to avoiding having to ^C (unsuccessfully).) Presuming what is wanted is a poster four times the size of a sheet of A4, then, since the image already is about that size, my suggestion is to use `--scale=1': $ pdfposter -m2x1a4 --verbose --verbose --verbose --scale=1 Micro-Magic_Plan_2016_V2.pdf Plan1-landscape.pdf Mediasize : 2.0x1.0 a4 1190.00 842.00 dots Scaling by: 1.000000 ---- processing page 1 ----- input dimensions: 2961.30 2094.21 (trimbox of input page) output dimensions: 2961.30 2094.21 (calculated) Pages w/o rotation 3 x 3 Pages w/ rotation 4 x 2 Decided for rotation: yes Deciding for 4 column and 2 row of landscape pages. Creating page with offset: 0.00 1190.00 Creating page with offset: 0.00 0.00 Creating page with offset: 842.00 1190.00 Creating page with offset: 842.00 0.00 Creating page with offset: 1684.00 1190.00 Creating page with offset: 1684.00 0.00 Creating page with offset: 2526.00 1190.00 Creating page with offset: 2526.00 0.00 $ That's a full-size image on only 8 sheets (landscape), or just over one metre wide and sightly less than 500cm high (half a metre). Which seems, to me, reasonable. (I do NOT know if the `-m2x1a4' is actually useful?) And it does work, albeit it still takes a long time to process: On my system, 12 minutes (100% CPU), generating an 80 MiB output file. (I have not printed the output, but it looks Ok in a PDF viewer (Okular).) Scaling up to the original 200 sheets of `--scale=4' suggests it would take about 300 minutes (5 hours), and generate a 2000 MiB (2 GiB) output file. I do not intend to test these estimates! ;-) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1846464 Title: pdfposter hangs with no output To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pdfposter/+bug/1846464/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs