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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)?

8128
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David Oneill
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6 Answers6

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Install posterazor 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
    alt text
  • Step 2: You can see the size of the imported image here.
    alt text
  • Step 3: Enter dimensions and borders alt text
  • Step 4: Enter the overlapping value alt text
  • Step 5: Define the final poster size for multiple sheets.
    alt text
  • Step 6: Save the poster.
    alt text
  • Now you will get all the split images in PDF format.
  • Print the image and integrate it.
Community
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karthick87
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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

plakativ

josch
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  • You can also use imagemagick's convert to create a jpg or png version of a pdf file. – mikemtnbikes May 30 '22 at 02:44
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    @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? – josch May 30 '22 at 15:37
  • 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. – mikemtnbikes Jun 14 '22 at 21:53
  • @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. – josch Jun 16 '22 at 10:42
  • Thanks for the information. – mikemtnbikes Jul 19 '22 at 14:20
2

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.

Skippy le Grand Gourou
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  • This is really a simple and straightforward solution. Based on this I could wrote a simple shell script. Depending on the size of the image to be splitted/cropped may be that the settings of ImageMagic has to be changed. See https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick6/issues/56#issuecomment-642340942 – Tibor Nagy Apr 19 '23 at 13:14
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I've tried using Calc, it works for simple cases, and doesn't need additional software installation.

  1. Open LibreOffice Calc, in Format > Page Style, set the page size to the size of the paper you use, for example A4.
  2. Set the page border as narrow as possible, for example 0.5 cm or 1 cm at each edge.
  3. Remove (uncheck) both header and footer.
  4. Click OK. After that, horizontal and vertical dashed lines will appear to show sheet partition for each page. I recommend to shrink (reduce the width of) the columns around the page partition lines to make it more accurate.
  5. Now paste the image on the sheet.
  6. Export as PDF to see the result, and then print.
fikr4n
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  • Very simple and effective. Most of us already have this tool installed, no need for something else. Thanks! – Will59 Dec 14 '22 at 17:57
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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.

Abhijit Navale
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0

There is a GREAT online tool for this job at https://rasterbator.net/ that makes this job easy. You upload an image, tell webpage how many pages you want and whether they're portrait or landscape. Then the website does the rest, producing a PDF of the required number of pages, with crop marks and indexing if you want.

django
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  • 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. – mikemtnbikes May 30 '22 at 02:47