Tiled printing
Tiled printing is a method that computer programs use to enable users to print images larger than a standard page, recently popularized by a program called The Rasterbator. A tiled printing program overlays a grid on the printed image in which each cell (or tile) is the size of a printed page and then prints each tile. A person can then arrange the tiles to reconstruct the full image.
Tiled printing has been widespread since the days of mainframe computers. Programs were available to convert images to ASCII art that, when printed large enough and viewed sufficiently far away, appeared to be smoothly shaded. Modern software may use halftoning to achieve a similar effect.
Another form of tiled printing, inspired by continuous feed printers, involves making a long message of letters, possibly with inline graphics of the same height, and printing it sideways over several pages to make a banner. This type of printing is usually associated with The Print Shop, a 1980s software package.
Inexpensive ink jet printers now allow people to make tiled printouts that do not sacrifice the original image's resolution. These decorations are sometimes called rasterbations, after a popular tiled printing program, "The Rasterbator."
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[edit] World records
Rasterbation is often the subject of record-breaking attempts to create the largest and most impressive tiled prints. The title of the world's largest rasterbation was previously held by "the Doomtech crew".[1] However, in June 2007 the graduating class of the University of Toronto Schools, a Toronto high school, produced a rasterbation incorporating 1462 sheets of 8.5"x14" legal-sized paper.[2] This achievement surpassed the previous record by over two hundred sheets, but then was overtaken by a group from Groton School in May, 2008. The Groton School Rasterbation[3] used more than 1500 sheets of 11x14" paper and was 100' tall, making it the largest ever. The Groton School rasterbation was made by a team of only six consisting of Ian MacLellan, Piers MacNughton, Lacarnly Creech, Hannah Jeton, Theodore Frelinghuysen and Chris Pitsiokos.
[edit] References
- ^ http://doomtech.net/wiki/index.php/Rasterbation_TG06
- ^ https://sites.google.com/site/shaniqua2007/Home
- ^ http://maclellanimages.com/blog1/2008/07/01/my-prank/
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tiled printing |
[edit] Applications
- The Rasterbator - a popular tiled printing application for Windows, which is free and open source software
- Rasterbator-NG - a Rasterbator version that works with Linux and Mac OS X
- Block Posters - online application that creates any size pdf posters from up to 1 MB images (free)
- Faster Poster - another online application that creates any size pdf posters from any size image (free) using any size media. It is also available as free and open source software at sourceforge.net
- PosteRazor - a graphical multi-platform tiled printing application that takes bitmap images as input and creates a multi-page PDF document (free)
- pdfposter - a command line tiled printing application for PDF files (free)
- poster(1) - a command line tiled printing application for PostScript files (free)
[edit] Articles
- "Freebie Rasterbator Makes Arty-Looking Posters" - PC World, April 8, 2010
- "Turn Photos Into Wall-Size Posters", PC World, May 13, 2009
- "Rasterbate in your dorm room", Dakota Student, August 25, 2006
- "Rasterbate More: Slap a pixelated Larry on your wall", The Harvard Crimson, December 9, 2004
