It feels somewhat old-school to write a blog post about printing, but this is mainly a note-to-self and a reminder for others who want to print a poster with an A4 printer. I don’t print very often, but I had to print an A2-sized poster from home, where I only have an A4 printer. I couldn’t find any options to print across multiple pages in the Ubuntu printer dialogue. Testing on a Windows computer didn’t help either. But of course, there are terminal solutions.
Pdfposter to the rescue
With the help of a forum post, I found a small terminal program pdfposter that scales and tiles a PDF so it prints across several sheets. It has lots of options, but I found this to work for me:
pdfposter -s1.5 -ma4 input.pdf output.pdf
Here, the options used are:
- s1.5: scale factor (150% of original).
- ma4: output paper/layout specification (e.g., a4, letter — in this command “let” is the paper spec used).
And that’s it. The command produces a new, multi-page PDF that can be printed.