How do I print maps?

[Yair]

Probably a silly question, but help a guy out: how do I print out maps? I've downloaded some maps off wizard's site, and I want to print them to scale. The thing is that they are *large*, so I need to somehow print the map in tiles or something and I have no idea how to do that. (With any program, but preferably a free one...)

I want to take a large map picture file, tell the program the correct scale, and have it divide things into seperate scaled pages and print them out.

No idea how to do that.

 

[Thanee]

I suppose there are some programs, which can do this, or some printers might have print drivers, which allow for poster print, splitting one big picture on multiple pages. I don't know any, though. Searching the net for 'poster print', 'tiles' and similar keywords might get you somewhere.

What you could do, unless you find such a program that is, and which should work with any printer, is to cut the picture file yourself into smaller pieces with a picture editing program (i.e. irfanview, which is freeware), then print them individually. Might take some trial and error to get the best sizes done, but at least it should lead to the result you want. It's probably not the most straightforward way, though.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Andur]

If it is saved in any "normal" format any half-decent printshop can do it for you. Probally run you $25 for color on a poster board size though. If you can use black and white, or more precisely blue and white, blueprint copiers can handle just about anything you could conceiviable throw down on a table for a session.

 

[XCorvis]

There's really not a good way. This works sometimes:

Count the number of squares across the map in one direction (if you can). You need to print the map on a piece of paper that wide (or tall, same orientation) to get 1" squares.

There is a program called PosteRazor that might be able to help. It's free.
http://posterazor.sourceforge.net/

 

[Yair]

Digging around my wife's collection of utilities, I found poster-printery [like this http://www.sharewareriver.com/products/5717.htm], which does the job.

Yair

(P.S., poster-razor's links doesn't seem to be working...)

 

[XCorvis]

(P.S., poster-razor's links doesn't seem to be working...)

They're back up today.

 

[Turhan]

My HP inkjet printer is a couple years old, a 7200 model, and when I print stuff, I can go into Properties, then select Finishing from that next pop up, and under finishing there is an option on the lower right for poster printing- a pull down menu.

I print stuff that way fairly often, but I don't pay too much attention to whether a printed grid is an exact inch or not....

 

[XCorvis]

I just found Posteriza[/a] yesterday. Might be useful if PosteRazor doesn't work for you.