Printing plans on other size paper

Merck

Member
I am lucky enough to have a printer that can handle 11x17 paper and wanted to use this medium. The FT plans are the full scale or designed for 8.5 x 11. This is great, but it would be nice to be able to re-size it.

I tried printing from Adobe Acrobat in poster mode, but it didn't line up perfect. I could fudge the lines, but I really didn't want to do that. So this is what I found that worked the best.

Go out and grab your favorite plan. Make sure it is the full size plan and not the separated out plans. If it is a plan with multiple pages, get them separated. I used Adobe Photoshop Elements to do this. Open the plans, make sure Photoshop isn't doing anything to the print (uncheck Anti-aliased, Constrain Proportions).
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Choose one of the pages and click okay.
Next, just save the file as Photoshop PDF.
Repeat the process for each page in the large PDF file.
I only used Photoshop Elements, because it was what I had. I'm sure there are other pieces of software out there that can separate files, but this worked for me.

Now that we have each page as separate files, we can tile them. To do that, I used Govert's PDF-Tiler.
After you download it, open that file and select the first page of your separated PDF files.
Choose your Output pagesize, or specify which size your want to print on. In my case Tabloid or 11x17
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Click Tile.
It will now create a new PDF that is tiled in whatever size you chose in the last step.

Now back to Adobe Acrobat DC
Open your newly created, tiled PDF file.
Click Print and made sure you choose these settings:
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These settings will insure that Acrobat doesn't mess with the size of your prints. Most printers can't print edge to edge. There will be some margin where it can't print. Keeping this on actual size will "clip" on the edges, but when you put them together it should line up nicely without scale issues.

If you found a simpler way, please let me know! This has been giving me really consistent results.

Happy flying!