Around 1987/88, I was finishing college and worked at a copy/print/desktop publishing business. We had, IIRC, Mac SE 30s with Radius full page displays and several laser printers (in addition to high volume duplexing copiers and a deal with a full print shop for larger runs).

Adobe PageMaker and Illustrator were the workhorses. I did the design and layout for newsletters, posters, business cards, menus, invitations, resumes, or whatever someone wanted.

The real kludge was the scanner we had on the Macs. It replaced the print head on an ImageWriter II dot matrix printer. You fed it what you wanted to scan and it “printed” over it, scanning it at 72 dpi, which wouldn’t pick up much detail. So we would blow up images on the copier, scan the large pictures, trace it into an EPS file in Illustrator, then use it for the client’s materials.

My speciality was turning Polaroid photos of gas stations/convenience stores into architectural style line drawings for a firm that did graphics and signage. Photo -> blow up on copier -> scan in multiple parts into grainy BW scans -> tile the pieces back together -> trace in Illustrator. They would then take my 11”x17” black and white line drawings and their designer would color them and introduce the proposed graphics. As time consuming as it was, it saved them money to hire us to do it and the results were pretty impressive - particularly since my artistic skills were minimal.

Worth remembering that these displays were small. The Radius or PERQ display was the same format as a piece of paper. It was "full page" only for 8.5x11, in the same way that 35mm camera sensors are "full frame". If you have a 21" or larger WUXGA display you already have 2 of these pages side by side and there aren't a lot of great reasons to run a display like that in portrait mode. Unless you are just dying to have realistic 11x17" pages, large portrait monitors are just an ergonomic problem.