I periodically find myself needing to make large paper patterns, larger than my printer can handle (and I have an 11x17 printer). If the software will tile the printout you're fine, but what if it doesn't? Here's what I did on my recent project:
1. Print the drawing to a pdf file. If your program doesn't already have that capability, you can download PrimoPDF for free. PrimoPDF appears as a printer to your computer, so any program that can print can use this to create a pdf file.
2. Open the file in a pdf reader. In Acrobat when you go to the print dialog, select Tile Large Pages under Print Scaling. If your pattern pretty much hits all the tiles, you're in good shape, just go ahead and print. But if your project is like mine, and a lot of the pages would end up blank, Acrobat has no way to select the individual tiles, as far as I can tell. Instead, you can use PDFXChange, a free pdf reader. Like before, select Tile Large Pages, but now under the preview diagram in the lower right is a place to enter the tiles to print. They are numbered across the rows.
Eg, if you have 4 rows of 3 tiles each, the tiles are
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
10 11 12
In the Print Tiles box, enter the tiles you want printed, separated by commas. That's all there is to it. (Except building the rest of the project.)
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