Introduction

The BIG Picture is an easy to use poster printing software that allows you to divide any picture into several A4 pages for printing large posters. It is great for making your walls look cool or for making conference posters without any special printer hardware.

The BIG Picture is easy to use. Just load a picture of your choice or drag drop it in and set the desired poster size in A4 pages. The program shows how the picture will be divided into individual pages and calculates the physical size of the final poster. Then just print the pages and glue them together to form your poster. The BIG Picture prints an informal marginal to each printed page to ease the gluing of the pages. Each page tells which page it is and what pages come next and under it in the final poster.

Step-by-step usage instructions

Hello and welcome to our short course on making your home look groovy. To start making your huge poster load your image to the Big Picture either by drag dropping it in or choosing 'Open picture' from the file menu. The Big Picture supports the JPG, BMP and GIF image formats.

Once loaded, your picture appears in the page division box on the left (source picture).



Now, choose a desired width in A4 pages for the poster you want to make. Big Picture tells you the physical dimensions of the poster and the total amount of A4 pages. The grid on the division box shows how your picture will be divided into print pages. You can preview any page by clicking on it in the division box. The box on the right then shows a preview of the chosen page. (Note: you get better quality results the larger your picture is. Also if the picture is heavily jpg packed the packing artefacts will be noticeable after enlarging the picture.)

You can also change the interpolation resolution, for instance to get pixelized results:



For smooth interpolation use values of over 600 (there is practically no benefit of using values larger than 1400). Although that the border texts become unreadable in the preview with large resolutions, the texts will be sharp and fine in the actually printed pages. (Note: when using resolution values of less than 300 the printed pages will not contain border texts.)

Once you have chosen the size you are ready to print the poster. Pressing 'Print' opens a printer dialog, from where you can choose the desired printer and settings. (Note: right clicking a grid page lets you easily print just that page.)

So check your printer out! You should have your pages printed. Now you need some glue. Each page has printer dependent marginals of white around the print area (only some new printers can print to the whole surface of an A4 page). If the print resolution is more than 300 pixel the pages have text margins down and on the right. The text in these margins tells which page is in question and which page should be glued right or below that page.

Cut the white left and top margins away from the printed pages and glue the pages one row at a time from left to right and from top down overlapping each page slightly on the pages under it (because of the overlap you should be able to see how). If you need you can change the amount of overlap from 'settings' in the file menu.



For a larger overlap percentage a larger part of the next page's image is contained in each page. This means that the picture is packed in each A4 page as you see above. With a 30% overlap the fly's leg from the next A4 is already visible on this page (and will be in the next page as well). As a result the poster will be 30% smaller in both directions than the A4 pages making it. Unless you have some special reason for changing the percentage let it be at the default value.

Presto! After the gluing you should have a nice, large poster of your picture. Enjoy!