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

It's in your printer driver

[bromba]

The options screen for most printer drivers under Windows has an option for this. For example in Epson drivers it's called "Poster Printing". Select this option and then set the number of pages your print out will span and you are done. Hope this helps

I'd probably use ghostscript..

[zcat_NZ]

I'd probably render the pdf into a very high res ppm then use pnmcrop to cut it down to individual pages. Unless gs can do the whole thing directly; I didn't actually bother to check. :)

easy in postscript

[Anonymous Coward]

Convert to postscript, then stick something like this in the beginning:

/xpost 4 def /ypost 4 def

userdict begin /bop-hook {
36 36 translate
dup xpost ypost mul mod
dup xpost mod hsize 36 xpost 1 sub mul sub mul neg exch
xpost idiv vsize 36 ypost 1 sub mul sub mul neg translate
xpost ypost scale
-36 -36 translate
} def end

This has worked for me in the past, but I can't remember exactly how to use it. Anyway I'm sure you can find *plenty* of postscript hacks out there.

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.

poster is a program for you

[Anonymous Coward]

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/poster.ht ml

in debian...

But you can use kprinter or something, what use this program. Or build it yourself.

crown

karma whoring

[dago]

ok, here are some links :

• Freshmeat :154, 849
• windows shareware

psnup

[DarkDust]

You might want to check out psnup. Unfortunately I can't provide a link to the homepage as the old homepage says that it's moving to a new location but the link leading to that new location is dead :-(

Anyways, psnup should be easily avaible via rpmfind or something, many distributions should also have it around (I'm pretty sure it comes with SuSE at least).

psnup works pretty good for me although it seems to have problems with posters of size A0 or bigger

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)'