sign printing question

[Tim Chase]

I haven't seen an answer come though to this yet so I'll take a stab.

> I need to print a sign in large print on a printer and need to
> create it first on the computer.  What would be the best
> approach using Linux command line tools to do this?

The "old-school" way to do this is to use the "banner" program 
and spew its results to "lp" to print them, such as

   bash$ banner -w 65 "Hello World" | lp

I set the width to 65, because at least on my machine here, it 
defaults to something like 120 characters across.  It works best 
with a dot-matrix printer (or at least continuous-feed paper). 
If you're using a Debian-based distro, it's in either the 
"bsdgames" or "bsdmainutils" package I believe.

To do more modern-looking versions, one would have to use 
something like the ImageMagick suite to create a canvas, draw on 
it, and then send that canvas to a PS file or PDF to be printed. 
  Or use a more gui'fied program like Inkscape.

-tim