Enlarged printing

Just try to enlarge something you've developed such as a flyer (shown above) or banner. Depending on your printer and word processing software, you may be in for a surprise. We checked online with Kinkos and Office Depot and were told that would be an easy task for them. It would take only minutes and would cost only$25 for a 17 x 22 full-color poster.

Before we shelled out $50 for the two posters we needed, we looked to see what capabilities we had. I never found anything in Word that indicated that capability. However, before I gave up and headed towards Kinkos I converted the document to PDF format with Adobe Acrobar. I had seen somewhere that Adobe can print huge pages.

I couldln't find what I was looking for so I actually clicked on Acrobat Help. The answer was right there under scaling: Tile All Pages. Only problem was, when I clicked the Print button I was given four choices and none of them was Tile All Pages. I went about checking all setting combinations and then started changing the printer. I could get the first quarter of a large poster but not the full sheet. At one point I even got the first 16th of a HUGE poster (32 x 44). Then I saw it, the elusive Tile All Pages. I scaled to 200% and the preview screen showed 9 tiles. I scaled back to 190% and the preview screen showed four pages. Just what I wanted!

I changed the printer so that I could do a test black & white. The preview screen showed only one page and the Tile All Pages disappeared. I changed back to the color printer. But the Tile All Pages DIDN'T come back. I almost pulled out whatever hair I still have on my head trying to figure this out. Finally, I discovered that after I changed the printer back to the color printer
I had to select the Advanced options button even if I never wanted anything on that page. But that brought back the Tile All Pages.

Now the color printer was able to print a four part blow-up of our flyer which we could tape together and get the results below.