How to slice large maps into individual pages

Slicing Maps into Individual Pages

So you may have a map that's bigger than one page, and you want to print it off at home. There are a couple of ways of doing this, but I'm going to walk through the process using a great little free program called posterazor. You can download it free from here: [link]

1. Open posterazor and select an image
2. Check that the dpi setting in the Image Information is the same as the number of pixels in a single grid square (as we discussed on Monday). Note that there seems to be a bug between Photoshop CS5 output and posterazor which causes posterazor to get the dpi wrong, but we can deal with that later.
3. On the next page pick your paper format (remember, US letter and A4 are not the same), orientation and margins. I go with 0.5 inch margins to make life easy.
4. Now pick the overlap. I find it useful to have half an inch of overlap between panels to make it easy to line up the maps.
5. Define the image size - I choose the 3rd option in the list and set Size in Percent to 100%. This ensures that the pdf outputs at the correct grid size. If the dpi was off in the first panel then change the percentage here. I find posterazor reads my Photoshop jpgs as 72dpi, when they should be 100dpi. I just set scale 72% here and that corrects for it.
6. Save the poster file! You're done.

This should now print perfectly, as long as you remember to turn page scaling off in the print options.

As always, feel free to share this round if it's useful. These tips are collated on the blog each week and appear here: [link]

The map in the example was originally created for the adventure The Breaking of Forstor Nagar. Fully printed out, the map is 60 inches by 40 inches, so it definitely needs slicing up for use at the gametable. You can see more on the making of the map here: [link]