Working in reverse.
There is no book that I know of, but what you need is right here on the forum with many people with a lot of knowledge at your service.
Just start over in your mind. There are no pixels per inch (ppi) until the print is ready to print.
So all you need is the knowledge from experienced Qimage users and large print people that you will be fine, and have a beautiful output at 200 ppi; not being able to see any difference between this print and the 300 ppi.
So you redo your file to 200 ppi x 218   and 200 ppi x 17, and you will get a TIF of about 444.7 megabytes. Far more manageable!
Qimage is going to have to interpolate the file to the native requirement of the printer driver anyway.
So you let Qimage do it's thing.

PPI is nothing more than dividing the print width into the pixels    64800 divided by 216 inches is 300 ppi
Each one of those 64800 number is a pixel of the horizontal of the image. So you can see, dividing them up into 216 inches, will leave 300 pixels in each inch.

You have my email address. If you feel that you have some specific question which I can help answer and perhaps use screen snaps to advantage, please email. 
We are restricted on the attachments to the forum messages.

If you are in the US or Canada, I can call you and we can work live, that way.
Fred

Make sure you check the overspray expansion settings in the driver.

Glad you are close tp what you wanted.

Fred

thanks for the link, that's a pretty good explanation.

Hi Jeff, yeah that's exactly right.  You're right that I can probably get away with less, I guess I just want to have the most detail I can. Kinda figure if I exceed expectations then it beats not meeting them.  I am likely sweating the small stuff.  The forum is pretty good for answers to a lot of my questions.  I am sure I will have more questions in the coming weeks.

Ended up finding everything.  All set the same as yours.  I just did a print with QI and the border was nearly 1/4".  Probably still okay for my use but would be nice to get rid of it.  Will keep fiddling with it.  If business stays good I will likely be upgrading to a 44" printer which will render the point moot on any prints under 44" I guess.

So I guess I solved my own problem.  Out of curiosity I opened the file info page for this file and for another larger one I did last week.  The only difference I could find is the problem file had an Alpha Channel.  I don't really know what that is but I am guessing that when I saved the original with the layers still separate, as I was not done working on it, it must have saved differently than normal.  I went in photoshop, re-saved it, unchecking the Alpha Channel's box.  This required saving as a copy for some reason so I did.  And whalla it is now working.

Can anyone shed a little light on this for an uninformed person? 

Oh and I also now seem to be printing borderless.  Not really sure what changed but I'll take it.  Until I undo whatever I don't know I did.

Hi Fred,

Thanks for the response.  Sometimes frustration gets the better of us and we lash out at the easy target.  In this case a defenseless computer program.  I will try to be nicer in my moments of stupidity.

So in the name of learning something here.  I read the part about Alpha Channels so I guess I had something else wrong.  However, while removing the alpha channel I must have also fixed the underlying problem.  Don't know what was different other than this image had originally been saved in layers while I was still working on it.

I know you have asked me a few times why not just use QI for all my process thereby solving some of my problems.  So here is what I do.  From what I have seen QI cannot do all the things I need.  I have watched most of the tutorials that seemed to apply to my process but I could be wrong on this count. 

I make backgrounds for model railroads.  They are usually quite long with the longest being 55 feet but I hope to do longer. (This is where QI was meant to be used and has with some user error been successful.)  The process starts as any pano would.  I take a series of images across my scene with overlap on each frame, usually about 20%.  I then take these images into Photoshop and use the stitching functions to put them together.  Then there is some cropping to get a rectangular shape.  After that I have to worry about the scale of the objects appearing in the image.  For example, a car is usually about 4-5 feet tall.  Well, if that car appears ten feet tall relative to my customer's trains or other scenery its just not going to work.  So, using the ruler tool in photoshop I adjust the overall size of the image until that car appears the proper scale height.  As everything is generally about the same distance, if I scale one element of the image then all elements change proportionally.   Scale is very important to my customers, an object can appear smaller than scale, suggesting a depth to the image, but never bigger.

Normally this is end of the process.  I now have a scaled backdrop and an enlargement size that results in the equivalent scale.  Thus I know that at 17" x 72" the objects in said image will be to the scale desired.  Sometimes, like yesterday, a client wants more than one image put together and merged.  I can usually do this using the clone stamp and some creative editing.  Often it also results in completely removing  one or both skies and replacing them with another as the shade for each sky is unlikely to match.  Easily done with a smooth horizon but when branches stick up into the sky it becomes a lot more tricky.  Usually these branches get some creative pruning.  Finally when all this is done and the image is the size my customer needs I can flatten it, save it, and print it.

There is likely a better way to do what I am trying but I have not found it yet.  It may well be that QI can do all these things for me but it is tough to change from what one knows.  If it can and it will improve my process I will spend the time learning to do it.  I have invested a lot of time and money in this little business and it may actually show a payoff.  I am actually purchasing an Epson 9900 this week in order to make taller backgrounds and the 4880 can only go to 17".

As far as QI goes it is a good program, even if I do get a bit frustrated with it.  I use it a lot for another side of my business, making small kits of buildings and stuff for cutting out.  QI places these image on the roll paper very efficiently and saves me a lot of paper.  I also use it to print wedding photos for a couple of local photographers.  Works great for this again although they have done their own color corrections and stuff.  I just tell it what size to print their images.  In fact after showing another friend how easy the program was for printing wedding images and similar I think he has been convinced to buy a copy. 

So re-reading this and some other threads and taking some time to watch the tutorials again I have a couple questions.  One I think I know the answer to already but want to check.  As you know by reading this thread I print some very long images and have experienced some issues seemingly related to file size.  When I adjust the image size in photoshop (I know thats not the actual fact of whats happening) it also changes the size of the file itself.  If I do all my scaling in photoshop, write down what print size equates to the scale I need, and save the original un-enlarged version, this results in a smaller file size.  It seems like I can then take that smaller sized file and use QI to handle my enlarging.  This seems like it would avoid the issues I was causing myself earlier.  Is this an accurate understanding?

Second, I have just purchased an Epson 9900 so I may print backdrops up to 44" in height.  From earlier explanations I am assuming that 200 ppi will still work just fine while keeping file size manageable.  That would be great. 

I am also wondering if more RAM would make any difference in the functioning of the program. So far it has not turned out that RAM was ever my issue in the first place and I think I have seen threads where Mike said it doesn't always make much of a difference.

Thanks