Print to fit in Microsoft Publisher

April 8, 2009 11:01 AM

How do I make an extremely large (100 inches wide) Publisher document print to fit on a single page?

I am curating an exhibition, and a colleague of mine used Microsoft Publisher (a program I have zero experience with) to make diagrams of where my items should be laid out within each of the 10 display cases. In order to make the layouts as accurate as possible, she did everything at full scale, which works great, but Publisher wants to print it out at the size of the physical display case (like Stephen Wright's joke about the 1:1 scale map of the world).

There doesn't seem to be an obvious "print to fit" kind of button anywhere that I can find. I've tried saving it as a tif or jpeg, but it says the file size is too large. I converted it to a PDF, but it came up as a totally fragmented 70-page document. Any suggestions better than the kludge we've come up with so far, taking a screenshot and printing that?

posted by Horace Rumpole to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I don't have any recent experience with Publisher, but can you set a custom paper size in your print-to-PDF device (one large enough to encompass the full artwork)? Then you can print-to-fit from Acrobat rather than Publisher.

Or can you save-as to some other vector-based format and get into a more robust piece of software?
posted by misterbrandt at 11:45 AM on April 8

What about File/Page Setup and then click the Printer & Paper tab. Does changing it from the custom size to Letter and then on the Layout tab choosing Full page as the publication type make it print normally?
posted by Sheppagus at 11:54 AM on April 8

Aha! After a whole bunch of futzing around, I did as misterbrandt suggested and reset the size of the sheet to custom=103"x48" in Print Setup->Properties->Paper Quality->Advanced, then printed to PDF, then chose "Fit to printable area" to print out the resulting PDF. (I'm documenting all this here to help anybody else who reads the question, and also because I'm afraid I'll never figure it out again otherwise.) Thanks!

Sheppagus, I can change the size to Letter in Page Setup, but there's no Layout tab there that I can find. (This is Office 2007 if that matters.) If you know what I'm missing, let me know because it would certainly be easier than all this converting to PDF.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:21 PM on April 8

I'm afraid I'm not going to be much help then, as I dusted off an ancient version of Publisher 2003 to play with for your question and I'm sure it is all different in 2007 with the ribbon and tabs.
posted by Sheppagus at 12:24 PM on April 8

Just a note to Sheppagus: Publisher 2007 is actually almost exactly the same as 2003. No ribbon. They hardly upgraded it all. They added some Pantone color thing, a color picker, and some more default page sizes. Other than that, it's the exact same program.
posted by waywardgirl at 7:24 PM on April 8