How can I make tiled plans?

[Raptortech]

Here's a pretty simple question:

So I have some plans that I drew up a while ago, and I would like to tile them to make them easier to print on 8.5x11 paper. I know that it is very easy to use Adobe Reader to print out tiled plans, but how would I go about tiling my plans so that a person can print them without Adobe Reader? In other words, how can I create tiled plans like the ones FliteTest has?

Thanks in advance!

 

[nerdnic]

@SP0NZ can help you with this.

Also, we really need a way to tag people in forums posts..

 

[Raptortech]

@SP0NZ can help you with this.

Also, we really need a way to tag people in forums posts..

Thanks. I figured you might reply, haha! I'll message him.

 

[nerdnic]

I don't do tiled plans but I know he came up with a good way of doing it in his rearranged plans thread.

 

[RAM]

This should work for anyone you send your pdf file to. It's done online, you select the file from your computer then click convert and it displays the tiled result for you to print. http://www.lucubration.com/pdf-tile-printer

The tiles are watermarked but as far as I can tell the service is free.

 

[SP0NZ]

I wish there was a simple answer, but there isn't that I know of. I do all my work in Inventor and AutoCAD. The 2D plans are done in AutoCAD and I basically spent many hours coming up with a format that I could use that makes it easier for me to create the full-size (20x30) and tiled (7.5x10) plans. It is still a very manual process. For a design that has 3 full-size sheets (see the Bloody Wonder MkIII plans for example) it took me about an hour to plot the individual tiles to PDFs. Then I needed to combine all the PDFs to a single PDF document. I'm looking for a way to automate that, but it might take some time. This process only works if you have AutoCAD, which unfortunately will be out of the price range for most people to use for a hobby.

I don't mins sharing the templates I made. You are more than welcome to try them in another program to see if you can make them work. But, it will still take a fair amount of time to generate the tiles and sequence them.

 

[SP0NZ]

If anyone has a better/faster way to do it... I'm all ears!

 

[Stingray Aviation]

Will SP0NZ's method work on an Inventor .idw or .dwg file? How exactly do you do it?

 

[altbob]

I've had pretty good luck using PosterRazor. You can download it free on the internet. It's an older program but still works great on Windows computers.

You can get it here: http://posterazor.sourceforge.net/

 

[DamoRC]

I know that it is very easy to use Adobe Reader to print out tiled plans, but how would I go about tiling my plans so that a person can print them without Adobe Reader? In other words, how can I create tiled plans like the ones FliteTest has?

Not sure I fully understand the question (or some of the answers). The tiled plans that FliteTest offers are pdf files, so you would need Adobe to print them in any case. It sounds like you want to avoid the pdf file format and still allow folks to print tiled plans without having adobe reader. Can you share what format your plans are at the moment? Is there a specific reason why you want to achieve this without using Adobe? I apologize if I have totally missed the point but I too am interested in how one moves from one format to another to allow folks to print plans (although I always assumed the end product would be a pdf as the reader is freely available).

 

[SP0NZ]

Will SP0NZ's method work on an Inventor .idw or .dwg file? How exactly do you do it?

I have found no easy way to do it...yet. I created an AutoCAD template with the 'tile' overlay geometry in it. I have to manually plot each tile to pdf and then I assemble them into a single PDF file. It took me about 45-60 minutes to create the tiled plans for the Bloody Wonder MkIII (which is 3 20X30 full-size sheets). I tried to create sheet formats for it, but the crop marks don't print correctly when I do. I'm still working on a better method. My templates only going to help someone that is using AutoCAD though.

 

[Raptortech]

Not sure I fully understand the question (or some of the answers). The tiled plans that FliteTest offers are pdf files, so you would need Adobe to print them in any case. It sounds like you want to avoid the pdf file format and still allow folks to print tiled plans without having adobe reader. Can you share what format your plans are at the moment? Is there a specific reason why you want to achieve this without using Adobe? I apologize if I have totally missed the point but I too am interested in how one moves from one format to another to allow folks to print plans (although I always assumed the end product would be a pdf as the reader is freely available).

I mention Adobe Reader because it has a printing function that allows you to print a large files (pdfs or otherwise) on several 8.5x11 sheets of paper. I have plans in a PDF format, and the PDFs are meant to be printed at 20"x30". If you don't have access to a giant printer of some sort, the solution is to use adobe reader to tile it before printing. This works, but ideally I would be able to publish those plans "pre-tiled" so that the person printing doesn't have to use adobe reader. FliteTest makes their plans available in tiled and un-tiled formats, and I was wondering if anyone had an information about how they generate their tiled plans.

 

[RAM]

Did you try the site I linked?????

I can easily upload a full set of plans and it converts them to a tiled set that I can download and save. It's now a tiled PDF file


?????? seems easy.

 

[johnmw]

the adobe print method works, another way i like using is print to pdf.
there are also some s/w out there like posterazor, rasterbator or something poster print utility.

 

[RAM]

the adobe print method works, another way i like using is print to pdf.
there are also some s/w out there like posterazor, rasterbator or something poster print utility.

It works and it's free but he doesn't want people to have to use adobe acrobat reader to tile his full plans. He wants to send them the plans already tiled. That's what this guys site can do for him http://www.lucubration.com/pdf-tile-printer

 

[johnmw]

ah i see..

 

[DamoRC]

Okay. I must be having a senior moment. If you could convert a large format PDF file to a tiled PDF file like RAM has demonstrated and like the FT tiled plans, don't you still need Adobe to open and print the pages?

 

[RAM]

Okay. I must be having a senior moment. If you could convert a large format PDF file to a tiled PDF file like RAM has demonstrated and like the FT tiled plans, don't you still need Adobe to open and print the pages?

Yes, but you need acrobat to run if you don't have a pre tiled pdf file. The link converts to tiled for you and you can open that file with your browser. I know it sounds odd but it is only confusing because he does not want people to have to open acrobat reader stand alone and do the tiling themselves.

And... It's a file, a file that you can open and it's already tiled vs. using acrobat reader and tiling the output for printing but getting no file.

 

[RAM]

I'll try to explain this once more but it requires that you try something first.

1. Download a set of plans, a full set, not tiled.
2. Open them, with your browser or get adobe acrobat and open them with it instead.
3. Try every possible way you can think of to re-save those plans as tiled plans.

You can't do it. You can use acrobat reader to "print" a tiled version of the full pdf file but you can't save it as a file.

 

[Raptortech]

The other reason I started this thread was for alignment marks and page numbering. Ideally the printed plans would have some sort of marks to indicate where to remove borders and how to align sheets, as well as a page numbering system to make assembly more easy. I should probably suck it up and just write a program to do this....