Aug 28, 2009

Print Images Across Multiple Pages in Ubuntu

Ubuntu, which I use as my primary desktop OS is sweet, but it always has these little issues, when things you're used to in Windows are either hard or impossible to achieve. Well, there's nothing impossible when it comes to Linux, it just depends whether it'd take two minutes or five years to achieve whatever it is you want.

Today I had to print a large image across multiple pages and couldn't find an easy way to do this. Apparently, this is a known issue.

One messy way to do this (assuming you have the time and resources to get the right size) is this:

$ lp -d hp -o scaling=200 -o media=a4 filename.png


Where hp is the name of the printer and 200 is the size of the original image in percents.

Sadly enough, this only works for bitmap images. I had to export my original .svg file to .png, otherwise I was getting just a part of my svg which was cut to fit the A4 sheet.

1 comment:

Mikko said...

If your source image is a raster image (e.g. JPEG or PNG), the the easiest program must be PosteRazor (freely available from Ubuntu Software Center). For more options, I'd suggest "pdfposter" which allows splitting a single PDF page on a multipage PDF variant. For example, command "pdfposter -p3x2a4 input.pdf output.pdf" will take input PDF file and print it on 3x2 layout of a4 pages. You can also specify output image size in cm or ft if you so wish. You can get source PDF file from any software capable of printing by using "Print to File: PDF" option in Gnome printer dialog.