Printing a poster (over several sheets of paper)

Question

I have a poster I would like to print. It is far larger than a single sheet of paper that can fit in my printer. What is a program that I can use to print it out on separate sheets of paper (to assemble later)?

Solution 1

Install posterazor it will be suitable for you. After installation, you can see posterazor under Applications → Graphics → PosteRazor.

Using posterazor:

• Step 1: Import your poster
  
• Step 2: You can see the size of the imported image here.
  
• Step 3: Enter dimensions and borders
• Step 4: Enter the overlapping value
• Step 5: Define the final poster size for multiple sheets.
  
• Step 6: Save the poster.
  
• Now you will get all the split images in PDF format.
• Print the image and integrate it.

Solution 2

PosteRazor is great if your input is a raster graphic like a JPEG or PNG image. But in my case, my input was a PDF with lots of vector graphics. Since I was tired of first having to render them into a raster graphic so that PosteRazor could use them and since I didn't want the resulting quality loss either, I wrote a new tool called plakativ. You can grab it here:

https://pypi.org/project/plakativ/

If you are on Linux you can install it with pip. Windows executables are also regularly built on AppVeyor CI: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/josch/plakativ/build/artifacts

The source code is hosted here: https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/plakativ

Solution 3

I couldn't try it (I'm not using Ubuntu and it's not in my distribution's main repositories) but having the same issue I came upon pdfposter, which is supposed to "scale and tile PDF images/pages to print on multiple pages".

However I found a nice solution in this article, using ImageMagick to cut the poster into several tiles. You'll have to do the math, but the command to use is basically

convert image.jpg +repage -crop ${WIDTH}x${HEIGHT}+${X}+${Y} tile-1.jpg

with ${X} and ${Y} varying for each tile.

Solution 4

Try using scribus. Its for DTP (Desktop Publishing) only. You will get help here http://docs.scribus.net/ also initial issues of fullcirclemagazine has good tutorial for scribus.

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Comments

[NeoShow]

It seems that it doesn't handle PDFs

[Forty-Two]

it does pdfs but only the first page :(

[Hennadii Madan]

ain't working for me

[Michael Cole]

"No Application Found"

[LukeJKendall]

I tried it and it printed, but the colours were very murky.

[Hans]

Theres an online version

[Admin]

You can also use imagemagick's convert to create a jpg or png version of a pdf file.

[Admin]

It's worth noting that rasterbator only works with jpg or png files, so you need to convert your pdf using something like convert. Since rasterbator's max width is 8192 rasters and 20MB, I found the following did the trick for my situation convert -geometry 8192 -quality 85 input.pdf output.jpg Of course you may need to modify the quality argument to get your image <20MB.

[Admin]

@mikemtnbikes did you read the bit in my post that explained that converting a vector graphic to jpg or png leads to loss of information?

[Admin]

yes I saw that. Since my understanding is that priters generally work with a rasterized version of a file, so long as you convert the file with the desired resolution (eg 600x600dpi) then I don't see how you loose any information.

[Admin]

@mikemtnbikes please try out printing a text document versus first rasterizing that text document to 600 dpi and then printing it. Even with bad eyes you will see a big difference. If you send a raster graphic to print, your printer will not use the dpi of that image. It will convert your raster graphic into its own raster format (depending on which printing quality you chose) which it will result in yet another quality loss. If you send a vector graphic to the printer, your printer will rasterize that directly without doing a raster->raster conversion. Please read up on the topic.