windows,linux,printing – How to Print a Large Page on Multiple Smaller Pages

linuxprintingwindows

How can I print a larger page (A3) on multiple (two) smaller pages (A4)?

This is sometimes called "poster printing", since the objective is to join the smaller printed pages together to form a larger page.

Some printer drivers do have a native option for this, but this question naturally concerns a situation where that doesn't exist.

Another assumption is that the program creating the larger page to be printed does not know how to split it into multiple parts for printing. If needed, the data format can be assumed to be PDF or PostScript, since you could easily create those from any print output by virtual "PDF printers" like PDFCreator.

I know Ghostscript can be used to manipulate PS and PDF data – would it be able to do do this too?

Solutions for Linux or Windows are what I'm looking for, but I'm interested in hearing about other platforms too.

Best Answer

There is a Linux utility called, surprisingly enough, poster, which does this for PostScript files.