Printing a large image

[Marpel]

I have a pattern which I wish to print out for a woodworking project. Currently, the pattern is approximately 5000 X 15000 pixels in size. It is my intention to print it out at 300 ppi and the only printer available is a generic 8.5 X 11 office machine. So, I am forced to break the file into smaller panels and print each one separately.

However, I just can't get my mind wrapped around the best method to accomplish this. Some of the image is fairly large areas of blank space.

The only method I can think of is to crop multiple 2400 X 3000 sections but, because some of the pattern is straight lines, it is difficult to accurately line up one crop section so it butts up to another. I was thinking about laying a grid on the image and using the grid marks for alignment, but am wondering if there is a easier and more accurate way. Or am I overthinking this.

Marv

[Winfried]

Have a look at the
Horizontal and Vertical Tile in the PWPs Printing dialog.
The missing part are crop/grid marks for alignement/glueing.
Or you use a dedicated printing programm (i.e. Qimage) for this task.
Or sometimes even the printer drivers have a poster mode build in.

[jsachs]

Tiled printing in PWP can handle this as Winfried mentions.

It will automatically split the image into pieces and print them on separate pages. You can set the overlap between images -- typically around 1/8 inch works well. This lets you trim the images without being overly precise and then line up the tiles by eye before you tape them together.

[Marpel]

Jonathan and Winfried,

Thanks for your help.

Before I start printing and potentially wasting paper, I want to confirm what is happening.

One of the images I am wishing to print is 2661 X 11565 pix. As the width (2661) is too long to print a single tile on the 8.5 inch dimension of the paper (letter size) at 300 ppi, I figured I would just tile the image 5 times for the length and a single time for the width (so if the image was laid horizontally, it would print across 5 sheets of letter-sized paper laid vertically - if that makes sense).

However, regardless of the orientation (Landscape or Portrait) I set in the Preferences tab of the first Print Dialogue, it appears the cropping rectangle always shows the paper lining up with the 8.5 side married to the 2661 side of the image. If I change the orientation (or even if I rotate the image prior to printing), the image will change but the paper also changes orientation and the result is the same.

Hopefully I explained this adequately.

What input am I missing in the Print Dialogue?

Marv

[jsachs]

print.jpg (97.52 KiB) Viewed 2717 times

There do seem to be a couple of minor problems with the interface for tiled printing (which I have not used or tested for quite a while). I will fix these for the next release.

1) The print preview part of the dialog box does not automatically update when you change the Horizontal or Vertical Tile setting -- it does update if up change the Orientation setting.

2) Auto rotate does not work correctly with tiled printing selected -- you need to manually select Normal or Rotated.

As in the screen shot, the preview illustrates how the image will be spread across the 5 pages. I created the image 2661 wide by 11565 tall @ 300 dpi -- if you meant it to be horizontal, then just change the Orientation setting to Normal or Tile vertically instead of horizontally.

[Marpel]

Thanks very much for all the help. I managed to get the image printed with only wasting a couple sheets of paper. One of the things that added to my confusion was the Orientation choice (Landscape or Portrait) via the Preferences tab in the initial Print dialogue, which comes up just prior to the PWP Print Dialogue. Sort of couldn't figure out how it impacted the outcome as opposed to the ability to orient the image in the actual PWP Dialogue.

But things turned out OK in the end.

Marv

[jsachs]

The Portrait/Landscape setting in the Windows Print Preferences dialog box determines the orientation of the individual pages which are then tiled according to the horizontal and vertical tile settings. If you switch between portrait and landscape in Print Preferences, to get the same results you need to switch the horizontal and vertical tile settings and the flip the Normal/Rotated Orientation setting.