Open Source Software for Print Tiling?

tileMe asks: "The US National Park Service's Digital Maps department's website claims the following: 'To print maps larger than your printer's paper size using page tiling, you must have the full retail version of Adobe Acrobat 5.0. The oversize map is divided into tiles or sections, each of which is printed on one page. You can then manually cut and tape these sections together.' I need to do this EXACT thing but can't purchase anything. What Open Source or Freeware software can I use and how do I do this? The only requirements are the software must run on a 300MHz PC with Win9x or Linux."

Comments

Postscript or the Gimp

[themo0c0w]

Try printing the map to Postscript from your browser (Mozilla's print to file does this nicely). Then, use the various postscript utilities out there to chunk it up and print the various pages.

Also, check out the Gimp, it may have something very similar--if you can get the maps to a graphic format like PNG or JPEG.

auto-tiling of postscript files...

[fingal]

I have a friend by the name of Simon Tufty who made a piece of software for designing kites. The output of this software was the plan which you then had to cut out to make the kite. The plan was on a scale of 1:1 and was therefore considerably bigger than most people's printer. He therefore wrapped it in a postscript wrapper that would do the tiling inside the postscript file itself. Therefore if you opened the plan in GV, then the number of pages that the document had would depend on the size of the output format that you set. It would also auto-create the cut marks around the edge along with labels to let you know which page should line up with which other page. Very cool. I don't believe that he is supporting the kite application any more, but I'm sure that if you got in touch with him then he would be happy to discuss the postscript hack.

There's more than one way to do it

[codehead]

Little known fact: inside the distribution for the DBIx::SchemaView perl module there's a PostScript::Poster module. You can write a one-liner with it:
perl -MPostScript::Poster -e 'print PostScript::Poster->new->posterize(-infile=>"mozil la.ps",-outfile=>"poster.ps", -scale=>2)'