Sign making with a home printer

June 12, 2020 11:57 AM

I have a list of demands related to the recent protests I'd like to post on a sign outside my house. How do I use a computer and 8.5x11 paper to print these demands large enough to put on a sign of my desired size?

I want some ability to produce an image (or just type words) with the things I want to say and graphics if any, but then have it print to a size I designate on as many 8.5x11 pages as needed to fit that size.

I want to do this to avoid having to paint a sign with a lot of effort and then run into spacing issues.

What's the best way to go about this? I have access to the Google suite of productivity apps, Microsoft office 2010, and Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator.

If there's some webapp that can do this too where I can just type in the text and it spits out a PDF or something with the right number of pages and max sizing to fit my designated space that would work too.

posted by Karaage to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Best answer: The print term for this is 'tiling'. Your large image can be 'tiled', which will print pages to the right overlap, etc.

In Acrobat, for example, in the print window, choose 'poster', and it will let you choose scale, overlap, etc.

The Word print window may also have similar options. If not, you can make a pdf from Word, then do the poster printing/tiling in Acrobat.
posted by hydra77 at 12:02 PM on June 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Illustrator is probably the easiest route, since it can print alignment marks when you print.
posted by jonathanhughes at 12:17 PM on June 12, 2020

Best answer: You can do this with any image using Rasterbator.

This free web tool specializes in transforming images with cool dot effects. However, you can turn that off and just have it enlarge and chop up the image for you.

If you want to do this for text, just save the text as a PNG or JPG first.

I had this same need last week for a BLM march in my town, and Rasterbator worked great for it.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 12:45 PM on June 12, 2020 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Yeah, Acrobat has tiling built-in. Design your document to fit a page, save it as a PDF. Open the PDF and go to print it. On Acrobat's print dialog, in the "Page Size & Handling" area, click the Poster button, and it'll walk you through tiling it out. You can set overlap, and the preview window will show you the final size based on how you tiled it.
posted by xedrik at 12:47 PM on June 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

A super simple solution is BlockPosters.com. Just upload your design, and it will ask what size paper, what size you want your finished poster to be, and whether you want to print it with the paper oriented portrait or landscape. Then click, and you get a PDF document set to your specifications to print.
posted by MexicanYenta at 1:19 PM on June 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

I have Illustrator and what I do is create a doc that is the actual size of the foamcore I'm using (no margins), set the type, then print at 100% which takes care of the tiling automatically. Tape it together and then use graphite paper to transfer the outlines to the foamcore.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 2:07 PM on June 12, 2020