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."

Re:translation:

[n9hmg]

As he said, he's looking for an open-source way of doing it, not buying or warezing the Adobe stuff. While I don't object to making a copy of a CD so you can preserve the original, watching a show taped earlier, or reading a book for a second time without paying for it again (all things publishers are trying to get control of), that would be stealing. Personally, I'm annoyed that the government would suggest that in order to use what we've already payed for, we have to buy something else. It puts me in mind of the tax software issue. If the IRS themselves can't write the tax code as software code (and open-source it), the code is too complicated.
Any, back on-topic - I think there's something called "poster" to specifically do that with postscript files. pdf2ps the file, and work from that. I'm not sure if those utilities keep color, though.

follow-up

[n9hmg]

An AC posted a followup about my IRS comment. Low-rated, likely to get missed, so I promote it here, and respond.

It's called the Internal Revenue Service, not the Internal Software Development House.

If you can't read the tax code (and fill out your forms with a pencil), then you're too simple.

I'll skip the question of electronically submitting pencil-on-paper forms...
What I'm talking about is that the code is so complicated that the group who creates it (based on legislative mandates) disclaims responsibility for the advice they give about it. They can give you an incorrect answer, then penalize you for doing what they say. There are actual conflicts within it, so you can get different answers by chosing different paths through the information. That's not logical. If they had to re-implement it as logical code, even pseudocode, and have the code work, we could then clearly state that it makes sense.
The fact that there is no "one correct answer" means that the system is open to exploitation by whoever has the best lawyers and accountants, and enough money at stake to make it worth spending some of it on lawyers and high-powered accountants. Following the law should not allow any ambiguity. If it's right, it's right, and if it's wrong, it's wrong. I don't want my well-being to be affected by an administrative judge's mood.

Re:follow-up

[Smallpond]

You're blaming the wrong people. Congress makes the tax laws which the IRS
has to implement in the tax code, regardless of inconsistencies. If
you want to change tax law, pay^H^H^H write to your congresscritter.

To get slightly on-topic, I've written to several people listed on
government websites for posting MS Word documents. Generally they
blame the geeks in their IT Departments! If the IT types can't get
away from proprietary software, don't expect much from the average
gov. official.

winbatch... heh

[gnovos]

Make a windows macro with windows "paint" ... take the image, move X pixels to the left, crop, print, undo. repeat. ...

Re:winbatch... heh

[walt-sjc]

It's not an image, it's a PDF. Won't work.

Postscript or the Gimp

[themo0c0w]

Try printing the map to Postscript from your browser (Mozilla's print to file does this nicely). Then, use the various postscript utilities out there to chunk it up and print the various pages.

Also, check out the Gimp, it may have something very similar--if you can get the maps to a graphic format like PNG or JPEG.

Re:Just ask Google

[walt-sjc]

First, the VERY FIRST LINK was to a debian package "poster". Poster takes eps or ps files and prints them over many pages. This is EXACTLY what the requestor was looking for.

Second, PDF files ARE basically postscript. This is WHY you would look at using postscript tools.

Third, by using some pretty standard postscript tools that come with virtually any distro of Linux, such as the pdf2ps or pdftops commands, (different tools, basically the same function) we can Easily handle the task.

Lastly, and this is directed towards a stupid moderator, my original post was a FLAME, not flame BAIT (and an informative flame at that.) The two are QUITE different. One is a properly directed verbal chastizing, the other invites heated response using inflamitory remarks, in escense egging people on, trolling, etc. Get it right next time.

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. :)

Re:I'd probably use ghostscript..

[zcat_NZ]

Or you can probably download the full retail version of Adobe through edonkey or kazaa.. normally I wouldn't advocate warez, but Adobe's a special case. Think Dmitry.

Re:I'd probably use ghostscript..

[orkysoft]

You want to reward them with extra marketshare for what they've done?

Re:I'd probably use ghostscript..

[zcat_NZ]

Good point. Fuck adobe. Use ghostscript!

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 [tufty.co.uk] 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 [freshmeat.net], 849 [freshmeat.net]
• windows shareware [cadkas.de]

Ghostscript, GSview, and RedMon are your friends.

[Jim Efaw]

Maybe you already tried this, but: Try installing GSview for Windows [wisc.edu]. If it can't grok the file, try printing it once the Evil Way but sending it to the RedMon virtual printer driver [wisc.edu] - then you'll have a copy you can actually use.

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

Re:psnup

[infront314]

Another program to check out is mpage [www.mesa.nl]. And I had a link... :-)

mpage can also be found via rpmfind [rpmfind.net].

another one

[Mike_R]

I needed this exact functionality some time ago, and mentioned it to a friend. He incorporated it into his anti-paint [rug.ac.be] program. It's a linux program and it needs to be compiled from source. I haven't tried it yet, so don't blame me if it doesn't work, blame the author :)

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)'

Re:Why

[DarkKnightRadick]

He could just use xpdf, couldn't he?

Another good program

[dmarcov]

If I remember correctly, Print Shop Deluxe for the Apple ][e (Apple ][ forever!) by Broderbund also does that neat tiling, although I think the last printers it worked with was the ImageWriter and Okidata MicroLine.

ImageMagick

[linuxwrangler]

ImageMagick seems to read the map files fine. It may take a bit of scripting but you can probably get it to slice and dice the map in whatever way you want.

NPS Digital Maps (PUT THE LINK IN THE ^%$ ARTICLE)

[mbstone]

NPS Digital Maps are here [nps.gov].

Hmm, too easy?

[Fritzed]

This might be TOO easy, but if I remember correctly, when you make an image in MSpaint that is too big, it automatically spans it across multiple pages. As long as you have your page margins set up correctly, this would do the tiling for you. Just convert whatever you need to print into a bmp and go for it.

->Fritz

Excel or OpenOffice.org/Calc

[YrWrstNtmr]

does this. The functionality for printing large, pagespanning spreadsheets also works for large images.

Paste the pic in, size it accordingly, adjust your margins/print area, and off you go.

Re:Excel or OpenOffice.org/Calc

[walt-sjc]

It's not a picture, it's a PDF. Won't work.