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)?

Answer 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.

Answer 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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.

Answer 7

For multipage pdf you can use krop

Simply drag two squares with the mouse, then click the smiley. Krop will write a file in the same directory of an interlaced PDF of the original PDF.

Answer 8

Posterazor does a nice job and shows what it does in a nice UI.
It was not packaged for my distro, but runs fine with wine.
When printing its output from a windows machine though, I could not properly set printing margins.
Solution was to embed (hardcode) margins in the pdf itself.
Which can easilly be done with some inspiration from @Skippy's answer.
Please use/adapt at will.

PE: updated link to POSIX shell example (instead of python).