Multi-page printing, aka, Print Tiling

[Sandos-users]

It should be possible to print one drawing over any
number of pages when scaled up. (This is a very unusual
feature which Illustrator happens to support.)

[Kidproto (kidproto)]

This is also called print tiling, where a user may scale a
drawing and then print it on maybe 10 letter sized pieces of
paper, and then that user can combine those drawings however
they want into a large composite. This is a nice feature if
you don't have a large scale print and need one.

[Bug Importer (bug-importer)]

great idea! I know I'd definitely print up some "posters" of
my stuff if this was available...

[Jaspervdg (jaspervdg)]

It's not that unusual, Corel Draw and OpenOffice also
support it.

[Sandos-users (sandos-users)]

Note that the support in Illustrator seems broken to me:
There is no way to make Illustrator NOT print in the
unprintable regions near the borders of the paper, making
for gaps. I solve this by printing to a PDF via the Adobe
Distiller PDF-driver with a setting of 0 margins, and then
using Adobe Viwer with setting "Scale to pagesize" when
printing.

[Mgsloan-users (mgsloan-users)]

Even paint supports this :)

But yeah it would be cool.

[alextretij (alextretij)]

It's a good idea.

[alextretij (alextretij)]

can you do it in 0.47?

[Alexandre Prokoudine (alexandre-prokoudine)]

Alex, it probably depends on GTK+ Print dialog

[alextretij (alextretij)]

Thank you.

[flexxip (wanebridge)]

It is valid very necessary thing. It is very necessary to me.

[Aaron C Spike (acspike)]

I seem to recall that all of the export options for PNG now apply to PDF as well. If this includes the ability to set the export area it could now be very simple to create tiled PDFs. It should be possible to create a quick mockup of this functionality in python with an export extension (assemble pages with pdftk?). And eventually this could be moved into C++. Last I looked the export code was rather easy to understand and this could be a good project for someone looking to start coding with inkscape. Because PDF and printing now share the use of Cairo, it may be possible to easily extend tiled PDFs to tiled prints to satisfy the original request.

Until then, I've heard people mention a program from KDE Print called Poster which tiles print output.

[Antonio Roberts (hellocatfood)]

Poster is a command-line utility that does work but is a bit confusing and only accepts eps files. Posterazor uses a fairly ancient-looking gui but it gets the job done. The only problem is that it doesn't add crop marks, so unless you add a border to your image it's hard to know where to cut.

Overall having this functionality in the program that you're using is just a big bonus

[Matt Absalom (matt-absalom)]

A save as tiled pdf file would be very useful. Acrobat (pro) will print tiled if the dwg page is larger than the printer, but most of us probably don't have the full version.

I frequently (normally) work with designs that are larger than the max A4 my printer supports.

[Ahmad Gharbeia أحمد غربية (gharbeia)]

The real problem with Posterazor is that it works with raster images as input. Not a good idea if your a vector artist.

I've been waiting for the posterising/tiling functionality in Inkscape for a while. And while I can do what I want with Poster, to many would-be users the command-line is a turn-off. So maybe a a GUI in Inkscape which relays the real work to Poster would be the best solution.

[[e-mail] (joakim-verona)]

Poster mysteriously doesnt work for my simple poster.

I was thinking of a simple dbus macro that could do this.

- save the current page layout
- set the page to A4
- move the A4 window iteratively and print each
- restore the original page

the advantage would be that inkscape does the printing and no intermediate program can fail,
other than the printer. The disadvantage would be printer interaction.

I think this will be rather easy to try out in my Inkmacs tool.

[Erik Streb (wicking)]

I can really recommend to use PDFposter¹. After trying to export a tiled pdf with Inkscape on the command line which didn’t work because this is still not implemented I found this small program by accident. It’s very easy to use (see the very short and easy to understand man page² or this example in a blog). It works with Windows and Linux. And Fedora and Ubuntu have it in their repos already, so very easy to install.

¹) http://pdfposter.origo.ethz.ch/
²) http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/man1/pdfposter.1.html
³) http://leolca.blogspot.com/2010/06/pdfposter.html

[grey tomorrow (gtomorrow)]

Hi - thanks for reporting this bug, I've manually migrated it to Inkscape's new bug tracker on GitLab, and closed it here.

Please feel free to file new bugs about the issues you're seeing at
https://inkscape.org/report .

Moved to: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/3691
Closed by: https://gitlab.com/greytomorrow