Printing a large poster on multiple small sheets of paper?

May 9, 2008 10:23 AM

I need to print a 3x4-foot poster onto multiple sheets of regular sized paper, so that I can assemble the pieces to recreate the full-sized poster on a poster-board. Is there any (preferably free) software that will do this for me?

The poster is currently in a powerpoint file, but I could easily transfer it to or recreate it in another program if necessary. The poster contains mostly text and a few color graphs.

posted by nixxon to computers & internet (12 answers total)

The Rasterbater has you covered.
posted by msamye at 10:29 AM on May 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

Rasterbator
posted by zippy at 10:30 AM on May 9, 2008

Jinx!
posted by zippy at 10:31 AM on May 9, 2008

I love the Rasterbator. Reminds me that I've been meaning to make one up for my new apartment, thanks!
posted by yellowbinder at 10:33 AM on May 9, 2008

I misspelled it, so one point to zippy.
posted by msamye at 10:34 AM on May 9, 2008

Thanks guys. I need to do this without rasterizing the poster, though. The text needs to look sharp and readable up close (it's a poster for an academic research presentation), so I need something that doesn't alter the original beyond chopping it up into page-sized pieces.
posted by nixxon at 10:54 AM on May 9, 2008

Download the trial of Adobe Acrobat (or use the school's copy) , import your image.

Go to print it, and set options as follows:

Print Range: Current Page

Copies: 1

Page Scaling: Tile all pages

Tile Scale: 450% (this will make an 8x11 sheet around 43 x 55)

And the rest play around with, you'll get the idea.
posted by bigmusic at 11:03 AM on May 9, 2008 [3 favorites]

Photoshop does this, but it's not free. MS Paint does this as well, but it's a bit less flexible (may need to do some resizing on your part to figure out how to fit it to the right number of pages).

If you have Windows, Paint is free of course.
posted by djpyk at 11:05 AM on May 9, 2008

If it's a poster for a research presentation, is there a reason you don't want to get it printed full size? I think it looks much better that way.
posted by pombe at 11:32 AM on May 9, 2008

Thanks bigmusic - that did the trick!
posted by nixxon at 2:18 PM on May 9, 2008

create a postscript version of the page, and then use poster.
posted by scruss at 3:00 PM on May 9, 2008

it's not software, but here's a free website that might help:
blockposter.com
posted by metacort at 11:15 PM on May 9, 2008