If you want to have a poster made from your own pictures, then you have two options – either visit a professional printing shop or contact a painter who can transform your picture into a beautiful painting. At the professional printers, they use large size printers that can print on very large size papers.
But now you can print your own posters using the ordinary laser or inkjet printers that are used for printing on the A4 or US Letter size sheets. However, for this to work we need a special software called Posterazor. It is an open-source software that produces a PDF file using which we can print a large scale image on smaller sheets and assemble them together.
Posterazor is a portable application and can be used on any version of Windows starting from Windows 7 to Windows 10. It offers a wizard-like user interface and takes you through all the needed steps in the following manner:
- First of all we have to select the source image which is displayed in the Posterazor window. Upon selection of the image, it will show much more information about the selected image such as size, resolution and color type.
- Next we have to select the paper type that we are going to feed in the printer. Usually it is the common A4 or US Letter paper. We can also choose the orientation (landscape or portrait) and the borders for the final poster.
- Since all the paper sheets are going to be pasted together, we have to leave some margins on each of the sheets for putting the glue. This overlapping size can be determined in the third step. 1 cm of overlapping margin works the best.
- In the fourth step, we can choose the final poster size and the image alignment. Using the different image alignments, we can make it easier for the final cutting and pasting work to be done.
- Finally, in the last step, we can save the PDF file which is then to be printed off the connected paper.
When all of the paper sheets are printed out, we can cut them along the lines and use any paper glue to join them together. This will make a large poster using the ordinary paper sheets that we use on the desktop printers.
You can download Posterazor from https://sourceforge.net/projects/posterazor/files/.