The posters that you buy in the traditional stores or through online shopping sites like Amazon, are printed using large scale printers that can print on sheets as wide as 2 meters. But these printers are only for industrial use and are very costly. If you do not find your favorite poster in any online or offline store and want to print it out, then you can either contact a professional printing service provider who can print it out for you for some charge, or you can print it out using your own small ordinary printer. The printers that well have at home or office can print only on small papers of A4 size or letter size. But using the Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, you can print a large size poster image on multiple small size sheets and then join them together.
Since the Adobe Acrobat Reader can print only PDF files, the first thing you have to do is to convert your poster image into PDF file. You have many options for doing so. You can use the free Able2Extract program to convert the image files into PDF documents. You can also use a PDF printer software like Bullzip PDF Printer for saving images as PDF files (make sure to choose correct paper size when printing through Bullzip PDF Printer).
Once you have converted the poster image into the PDF format, you are ready to print it over multiple small size paper sheets. You have to open this PDF file in the Adobe Acrobat Reader. It is recommended that you use the latest version because this feature to print a large PDF document over multiple sheets is not present in earlier versions. When the file is open in the Acrobat Reader, press Ctrl+P or click on the printer icon in the toolbar.
When the Print dialog opens up, select Poster from under the Print Sizing & Handling section. You would be able to see how the large poster image would be split into smaller tiles and printed over smaller paper sheets in the right side. You can increase or decrease the tile size, printer margin etc. You can also include the cut marks, paper labels and the poster orientation.
As you click on the Print button, it will print all the tiles on your connected printer on the supported size paper sheets. If you have selected the Cut marks option, it will print the cross-mark on all the corners of the sheets to indicate where you have to join the sheets. Similarly, if you have selected the Paper labels option, then it will print the document name and row-column for each of the sheet so that you can arrange all the sheets together in the correct order without any problem. Without the paper labels, it will turn into a small jigsaw puzzle, and you may end up pasting sheets in the wrong places.
Conclusion: Printing a large size poster usually requires a special large scale printer setup, but you can use your small size home or office printer to print the large poster image on multiple smaller paper sheets and then join them together using the Adobe Acrobat Reader.