Make 12x18" signs at home on 8.5x11" B&W laser printer

- Susan Bugher wrote:

I don't like guessing either and there's no help file.

Hi Susan,

Thanks for providing these two free Windows tiler suggestions.

The Posterazor tiler is so much better that it's not worth spending much
(if any) more time on Posterizia, I think.

One of the web
pages does note "Use any photograph as background. Supported formats are
BMP, JPEG, PNG, EMF and GIF. Uou can even use just part of a photo!"

I think all three handle pretty much any image (I didn't test thoroughly):
1) Posterazor (best, easiest, fastest, most intuitive)
2) Rasterbator (it works & has alignment marks but use #1 above instead)
3) Posterizia (I'm sure it works but I didn't get it to work in 10 minutes)

I've played around a some more with Posteriza, When I selected a photo
and then clicked "more" the app showed me how the image fit on the paper
for the printer's current page selections and gave me options to rotate
or crop it.

I gave up on Posterizia after about 10 minutes, which is all I give a free
ware program when I already have one that works. If I didn't have one that
works, I wouldn't stop at just 10 minutes.

Testing freeware, when you already have one that works, is sort of like
looking at plucking an apple off the tree when you already have a bag full
of them in your arms.

It has to be really juicy to beat out what you've already picked.

Posterazor is juicier than Rasterbator, but not Posterizia, IMHO.

It looks to me as if the easiest way to print exact widths or lengths
could be by changing the margin. Lessee, the default is 10 mm and there
are 25.4 mm to an inch - I input a 50 mm "page margin" and, yes indeed
(smile), got the 2" margin I was trying for on the (single) printed
page. (A little work will be needed to calc the right margin setting for
a grid of pages)

I see where you're going with this, which is sort of to cut off the bad
parts of the apple and then it's just as good as the apple in the bag.


There are some differences between what you saw on your machine and what
I'm seeing here - dunno if it's because our Windows versions are
different or because the printers are different.

My installation logs are really like tape recordings of my interactions in
real time, so a lot could be dependent on the order I did things, and the
buttons I pressed. I should just find a good voice-recorder program and
then convert that to text, and that would be my installation log.

It aso seems to get
stuck on some things when it should be changing the display, something
you also noted.

Yes. I could change things, and it didn't trigger the display. So I had to
go back and forth. I could live with that if it worked but I never did get
it to change the symmetry (which you did with borders).

So - not totally glitch-free but easy to use and a think
most of the glitches are from things I'd normally not be doing.

I'd spend more time on this apple if I didn't already have two of them in
the bag, where Posterazor is far better (IMHO) than Posterizia and
Rasterbator.

Rastergator & Posterazor have the same five-step use model, but the
switches on Posterrazor are far better, mainly in that you can just tell it
the final output size (which is the most important thing) and it figures
out the rest, but also because it can handle inches and because it's much
faster, and because it has more intuitive settings.

The main difference between Rasterbator and Posterazor is that Rasterbator
asks for this cryptic "dot size" which I don't know what it's supposed to
mean since a 1mm dot never shows up anywhere when I tell it to be 1mm and
since it's far slower, I have to wonder what all the crunching is about.

Thank you very much for your suggestions.
1) Posterrazor is a keeper
2) Rasterbator is second fiddle to Posterazor
3) Posterizia might work for some people