Tiled Printing

[gdavidson]

There is a feature I desperately miss since the good old days of the Acorn (Anyone remember !Poster ?)… Tiled Printing!

This allowed you to work on drawings larger that your printer’s maximum paper size, commonly A4, and then have the software automatically print the finished design on multiple pages which were then glued together to make one large sheet of paper. It’s great for one-off posters and banners on the cheap.

On each tiled page there were crop marks for cutting and a small grid number which helped you to know which page belonged where on large designs.

There are ways to work around this within Xara involving moving the drawing around the printable area and printing each “tile” separately but it’s a bit of a fiddle which has to be repeated for each copy.

I have no idea if there would be much demand for such a feature but perhaps its food for thought if any open source developers are looking for cool things to add

[Bob Hahn]

That would be a neat option. Since you are working with vector graphics, they will still look sharp no matter how large you print them. Although I do agree that perhaps it may not be the most used feature, but wouldn't hurt to have.

Picasa 2, a free photo viewer does have the option of creating posters. I use Picasa myself but never created a poster from it.

http://picasa.google.com/index.html

-Bob.

[gdavidson]

Thanks, Bob, for the Picasa link - an interesing app in it's own right! It sets me thinking if it would be possible to produce an enormous tiff file the size of a poster and then feed it to picasa for tiling. I'd be surprised if either picasa or the computer didn't choke on it though

I was gobsmacked to see that ArtWorks (the Acorn precursor to Xara on the PC) still lives on, and supports tiled printing (http://www.mw-software.com/index.html)

I used to use it for producing huge cheques that you see people holding in charity events during a press photoshoot.

[John Rayner]

The area "outside" the printable area is limited sorry to say. So moving a large graphic around a small printable area is not always possible. What I have found that works rather well is to create a rectangle the size of the printable area on your printer. Set it on a layer behind your large graphic and create separate high DPI images of your output. then just pop those bitmaps in another scratch file for printing... Makes tiling large graphics easy...

Used this on my 42"X30" map this summer for creating the "draft proof". (Do not have a printer that will print 30" wide...

[gdavidson]

Hi John,

You can extend the grey area outside the printable area by going to utilities>options>page and modifying the "spread" value. Interestingly, the whole area can be 9ft wide/tall which just gives 4 1/2 feet of tiled print capability... If I worked that out correctly

Actually, with built in paper sizes like A0, there can't be many people that could actually print that without resorting to some sort of tiling print facility )

[Albacore]

Hi Graeme,
Long time no hear if you are the same person from the Aberdeen area who created great photo realastic drawings from a few years back. Yes it would be nice, I have to go into AI to do that, so if there is anything special that you want and you do not any opps. to use it send me a private message and I will try.

[gdavidson]

Hi!

It has indeed a been a long time! Hope all is well!

Yep, 'twas me that did the aforementioned images although I still find it hard to believe I did them! Nice to see they're still in the XaraXone Gallery at http://www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/gd/index.htm Regrettably, I don't think I have any more worthwhile artwork beyond that which has already appeared in the forums a few years back! (well, I just had a look and there were a few more at http://www.davidsonelectronics.co.uk/xaragallery/ if anyone's interested!)

Thanks for your kind offer - I'll keep it in mind

I recently bought Photoshop CS2 for the sake of seeing what I was alledgedly missing but it's still Xara that absolutely wins out for my day-to-day bitmap tasks (usually resizing digital photos these days) which it does with great ease. It's a pity Photoshop didn't support tiling like AI though - I'd have pulled a poster over as a bitmap into it

It's great to see the Xara community is still thriving and that Xara has been immortalized in the realms of open source, out of the reach of being silenced by large corporations!

[John Rayner]

Hi GDavidson,

Never thought to change the spread. Learn something new every day. Max seeting for the spread is 4656 pic with an letter size page.

[pawel]

I need to print big sized images on my A4 laser printer and Xara "Pro" can not handle TILE printing.

Right now I have to take my images on a CD to a print shop
and pay for big printouts while my $920.00 printer stay useless
at home.

It is about time to get some Pro options to Xara!

Cheers
Pawel

[HayTay]

I need to print big sized images on my A4 laser printer and Xara "Pro" can not handle TILE printing.

It is about time to get some Pro options to Xara!

Pawel,

Don't get mad, life's too short for such minor inconveniences. I agree that the option to tile print large images would be an awesome addition to Xara Xtreme and Xara Xtreme Pro. In fact, after I purchased Xara Xtreme, that was one of the first questions I asked the Xara support team. Of course you know the answer.

I did find, and now use, a fantastic little program called Posteriza to manipulate Xara created large format graphics so that they can be printed on my laser or inkjet printers. And, check this out, IT'S FREE!

Posteriza's Main features are:

• No installation required. No weird files on your system.
• Use any Windows printer.
  
• Use any paper supported by your printer. Any size. (A4, A3, Folio, Letter, etc).
• Posters can be any size you want. Using this program you can ever cover an entire whole wall of of your house!
  
• Use any font installed in your system for text.
• Use any photograph as background. Supported formats are BMP, JPEG, PNG, EMF and GIF. You can even use just part of a photo!
  
• Choose predefined type and color for the frame.
  
• MULTILINGUAL: The program is totally multilingual. Available in: Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, Catalan and Valencian. We are working in other like arabic.

Maybe Xara, LTD. could look into licensing the code and modifying it to natively print both vector and raster images. It would make a fine addition to Xara's and/or Magix line of software products. Hint, hint. Nudge, nudge. That would be just too !

Give it a try,
Did I mention that Posteriza is FREE?,
HayTay