How do I print onto 4 sheets?

[shiphen]

Xara Xtreme v2.0f / WindowsXP Pro

Hi

Sorry for newbie-type question, but how do I print on diagram
across 4 sheets of paper?

Background:
I have an A4 printer and I want to print a large "mind-map" type
diagram onto a 2x2 matrix of printed paper - creating in effect an A2 printout presumably...

With thanks


Ship
Shiperton

[gwpriester]

This is not an easy thing because Xtreme does not have a way to tile images when printing. And then you have the natural limitations of your printer in regard to the margins (unless your printer can print borderless).

What I do is to make the image twice as big as the page and group all of the objects. Then place a very thin line down the vertical and horizontal centers.

With Show Print Borders enabled, I drag the top left 1/4 of the image onto the print area and print. Then the top right, lower left and lower right.

The 4 pages then get trimmed and taped together.

Not very elegant, but it works.

Gary

[shiphen]

Gary

Oh my GAWD! Do you really have to do all THAT?!
So you have to move stuff into the printable area MANUALLY?
Aaaaaargh. What an utter nightmare. Just the sort of thing that Xara really ought to have sorted out YEARS ago. I mean it's SUCH an obvious thing to want to do with graphics - print larger than your printer lets you.

Hey ho. Still it's a great bit of software and broadly I love it. But boy this kind of glitch does test ones patience, sometimes.

With thanks


Ship
Shiperton Henethe

P.S. Btw what does "Multiple Fit" do in that case? Is that for printing exactly the same document multiple times on the output piece of paper?

[David O'Neil]

Here's a trick that may be easier than Gary's in the long run, even though it looks a lot longer based upon my writeup.

This trick starts with the same basis as Gary's. First start with your drawing being twice as big as you want it, so if you are printing on an 800x400 pix page, the overall drawing would be 1600x800 pix. (This means that you are drawing over 'grey' areas, and can be a little disconcerting, unless you draw it to 800x400 and then scale everything at the end.)

Create a layer called 'PrintLayer', or something equally catching. On that layer place 4 equal sized rectangles, white fill, no outline, 1/2 width and 1/2 height of the print drawing (800x400 pix in the example). Arrange those 4 rectangles edge-to-edge, so each rectangle is on an area you want to print. Then place that layer at the bottom of the layer list, so the rectangles are underneath all other drawing objects.

When you are ready to print, select the rectangle that is under the area you want to print, and then print 'selected objects' on the print dialog. You may select the rectangle by either 'drilling down', or by turning the editibility of all the other layers to 'uneditable' and then clicking on the rectangle. Turning the layers uneditable may be time consuming if you make extensive use of layers, although I heard talk this may be easier in upcoming versions.

This way you do not have to move the entire drawing around in the print area selection step. If you want the drawings to overlap slightly, as shown in Gary's image, adjust the rectangles accordingly.

Doing it this way, only things above the selected rectangle gets printed (and maybe below - I've never tested). You could make the rectangles have a thin 'white' outline, and no fill, making them harder to select, but definately making anything below them printable.

And yes, it is kinda a pain. I am fortunate that I've never had to use this method for printing. (It should work even though I've never tested the above procedure.) I have had to use the equivalent in order to export sub-portions of a drawing to external files, and it is a quite logical operation in that instance.

Another topic that may be helpful in this case is guide objects on a guide layer, but I won't go into that. They may make scaling the objects much easier to get right, although selecting everything to scale and then manually changing the width and height is also very easy. (I just started using guide objects yesterday, and found you can do some very cool things with them, thereby making me include a blurb for them.)

David

[michaelward]

Don't forget to look at your printer options - some printers (mine is a Canon i850) have this sort of option built in to the printer driver itself. It's an option worth checking before going through any lengthier procedures.

[stlewis]

Another option: Proposter.

http://www.ronyasoft.com/products/proposter/index.html

[shiphen]

Have any of you guys actually tried Proposter (with Xara Xtreme / WindowsXP)

Do we have to save the Xara output as an image (e.g. GIF?) and then
print it using Proposter?

Ship
Shiperton Henthe

[stlewis]

Ship

I have it - and use it occasionally.

You do have to export eg to jpg. Make sure you size it large before you export. You can also copy and paste from Xtreme but the quality is not so good.

It works fine - cutting and glueing the paper is the hard bit.

[pauland]

Have any of you guys actually tried Proposter (with Xara Xtreme / WindowsXP)

Do we have to save the Xara output as an image (e.g. GIF?) and then
print it using Proposter?

Ship
Shiperton Henthe

Ship, there's a free trial so why not give it a go yourself?

My HP printer will build tiles as part of the printer driver, so it can do this without extra software.

Paul

[Craig1128]

for a free alternative for printing posters, you might try Posteriza... http://www.posteriza.com/es/index.php?lang=en_US
You can look at the screenshots to see if this program will help...