How to do simple multi-page printing on a PC?

[pmc]

Sounds like a serious noob question and it's probably already been addressed here, but I can't seem to figure it out or find a related thread.

The Windows Photo editor (I forget what they call it) and Visio, and even Gimp 1.2 under Red Hat 7.2 all seem to push the same agenda with me. I think Adobe Acrobat does this too.

I want to make a temporary/test marquee on tiled Legal or Letter formated paper and am printing a 24.5 x 7 inch JPEG on a HP Color LaserJet 4550 PS.

Every damn piece of software I use wants to scale the image to fit paper. That seems reasonable at first. So I change the scaling to 100% or disable "fit to page" or whatever it takes to get back to 24.5 x 7. The result is that I can only seem to print a single page with a single portion of the marquee. Never can I say "print all pages that has stuff on it" like MS-Excel which will gladly print a zillion pages even if each page only has a single cell on it. So I never get all the parts of the Marquee laid out over several pages.

Now I just had a thought -- the old Illustrator used to let you create a 9-page blank document and then create or lay a big image down across them all. It'd print each page which you could tile into a single large image. But you had to create the underlying page structure before getting what you want (i.e., it was a function of paper and not the image on the paper). I bet I can make Visio do that.

Any other ideas? How are you doing it? I'm amazed this has me stumped...

[AlanS17]

Well it's a very low-tech method but it'll work if you jsut want a preview... I don't know what software you have so this is the fastest way...

If you like the way Excel works, copy it into Excel. If you like Word more, use Word! TADA!

(I know it's not a very professional solution but it provides fast results.)

[pmc]

Well it's a very low-tech method but it'll work if you jsut want a preview... I don't know what software you have so this is the fastest way...

If you like the way Excel works, copy it into Excel. If you like Word more, use Word! TADA!

(I know it's not a very professional solution but it provides fast results.)

Ahhh.... wouldna thought of that! copy-n-paste.

In Visio I found the controls that let you force the page size to be the size of the image or the custom size. Interestingly, that isn't enough. I also had to tell it use Letter paper and then print it landscape on 3x1 pages (fit to 3 pages x 1 page but at 1:1). That did it.

But in any of the other apps that don't give you that level of control, I still don't know how I'd do it. Pasting into Excel sure would work. Hmmmmm. pasting into Word and then rotating 90-degress would get it to print on 3 vertical pages, but I'd question the image quality. But I'm sure it'd work.

Thanks for the feedback.

[IceCold]

I copy and pasted to wordpad, but it made my image smaller, so I wasted 2 pages of photo paper

[tmasman]

Just crop out 1 page at a time & print it that way.

[GSXRMovistar]

Just crop out 1 page at a time & print it that way.

Yep thats exactly how I did my test CP overlay, I cropped 8 images printed them off one by one, trimmed the edges then tape them together.

[TalkingOctopus]

I think this may be the easiest way:

I used a tif image and ms paint with the margins turned down to a minimum.  Paint will automatically do multipage printing with no hassles.  Just do a file > print!  I printed out my cp template using this method.

[tmasman]

The problem with Paint is that it doesn't follow the resolutions that are set by other programs...
I just checked Paint & it translates pixels->Inch as 96 pix -> 1 Inch... blah!

I guess if your image is scaled correctly (to print correctly) then this would be an easy way to go.
Just scale is down to be the size you need it (scale & print it with paint).

I use Microsoft Photo Editor (it installs with MS Office) to do my cropping & printing.
Photo Editor allows printing at different scales. You just crop out what looks like 1 sheet, click File->Print,
You can then set the height that the image needs to print at (it will keep the appropriate proportions by default).

I don't have access to Photoshop or any other product that costs $$$. I use Gimp to do alot of original work, MS Paint to scale anything down (surprisingly enough MS Paint does the best job at scaling images down of all the free software I have), and I use MS Photo Editor to save JPG images (it does even better that GIMP with photos... better quality & smaller size)

I know this seems like alot of stuff, but it's given me the best results without having to go out & buy a top-notch software package.

Good luck!