How to print large poster at home

How to use your small format printer and print large poster at home

Required software: PosteRazor + Adobe Acrobat Reader + image ready to print
Type: Tutorial
Difficulty: Intermediate

Most people choose to print posters with printing service or printing company. If you want print your poster at home, you need color printer (if you want color poster :). If you want print only one poster, you can play with printing at home. If you want print more posters, there is recommended to use printing company or printing service. There are many on-line services too.

How to print poster at home

First you must to know that your home made poster will be divided into printed pages. If you don’t have borderless printer, you will need to cut empty borders on each right border and bottom border printed page. It is not easy if you use scissors only. Better is paper cutter. Check if you have enough toner or ink.

If you use Mosaic Creator, result images are saved to directory C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\MosaicCreator\Out.

Prepare your poster picture. Best way is divide it into pages. Each part of picture will be printed on one paper sheet. It is better solution as direct printing from specialized poster printing software. If there is some error during printing, you can continue with any selected page. I can recommend you to use free software PosteRazor (http://posterazor.sourceforge.net)

When you use PosteRazor, image will be cuted into pieces and result is saved as multipage PDF. Result is saved after few wizard like steps. You can select poster image, paper size and result poster size. If you have borderless printer don’t forget setup borders to 0, if you want place papers side by side. Otherwise you can keep default settings.

When is your PDF saved, open it in Adobe Acrobat Reader and check if your result is not too grainy. You can print one selected page. If there are visible dots or squares, your image is too small for your poster.

Next if your test page is ok, you may start print your poster. Remember if you use ink-jet printer, printing may be expensive. There are many alternative cheap inks, but you should decide if you want stable color quality or lower price. Don’t forget to use paper for high resolution printing – mate or glossy as you want.