I have a PDF file, the second page of which is a bus route map. I want to print a hardcopy of the bus map, but a lot of details are presented in fonts so small as to be illegible when the whole map is printed on a single page.
My past solution:
open PDF file, scroll to page 2, zoom page to full screen width (2560 pixels).
screen capture (<alt>+<PrtScrn>).
use photo editor to crop away the perimeter crap, leaving a nice chunk of map.
copy/paste chunk of map into CAD program.
repeat steps 2-5 for remaining chunks of map until an entire map is pieced together in a CAD document.
stretch/shrink the images as needed in the CAD document to get the whole map to span several sheets of printed paper, then print the CAD document.
trim/tape sheets of paper together to form a complete map X sheets wide by Y sheets high.
This works, but I’d like to eliminate some steps. Is there a program/utility out there that will take a single page of a PDF file and print it piecewise onto several sheets of paper?
When I select “Print” from Acrobat, I get the print dialog, but I didn’t see this as an option. Is this where I should expect to see this (if it’s available), or do I need to twiddle with the printer settings from the Control Panel in the Start Menu?
Printer is a Brother wireless network printer, about a year old.
EDIT: never mind, just found the option in the Control Panel. Thanks for the tip!
If the map is a single object, there is an object selection tool (in the same list with the hand tool and text selection tool). You should be able to activate the object selection tool, point at the map, right click and select copy to get it to the clipboard.
Then paste it into paint or other editor that can resize it, tweak it to your specifications and you’re done.
If you don’t mind paying a little bit, your best bet might be to take it to a print shop (like Kinkos) have them print it out for you on something larger.
OK, you probably don’t care at this point, but I was a little off in my instructions.
There is only one selection tool - it’s used for text, images, objects, etc. Select that tool instead of the hand tool, left click on the image. The image will now be hilighted/shaded. Right click and say copy. Now you should be able to paste it into paint or whatever editor you like.
There is a program called poster which will do this for PostScript files. It may or may not work directly on PDFs, though it’s trivial to convert between the two.
Another alternative would be to open the pdf in gimp (download via www.gimp.org - free).
You can open the entire pdf, a range of sheets or a single sheet. You specify the resolution when you open the pdf - a word of caution, opening files in really high resolutions can take a little while and eats memory. The image can then be cropped and exported in a format to suit your CAD program, which will eliminate all your tiling/patchwork.
Although GIMP can print (and you can set the image resolution and size, and preview) I have no experience with multipage printing from GIMP, and I have heard anecdotally that it can be a bit of a pain.