Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Dear all,
Hope is not a repeat of a post in the old yahoo group.
I did a few searches but could not find this one.

When I select a poster I have understood that I should use
Margin 1 for the margin to be applied on each page being printed

However, I have been unable, so far, to have Qimage to print the image centered in the TOTAL resulting page.
So if I'm telling QIMG to print on a 3x3, I'd like the image to be centered with respect to the virtual 3x3 page.
Alas I have not yet been capable of doing it.

Is it possible ?

It would also be greate (or I could not find it) If there was a preview that showed (even in low quality) how the picture will be split.

Thank you.
Marco.

The "standard" method of printing a poster is to set the placement to "center" and just add the poster to the queue.  Margins/borders should not be used.  Because poster panels are designed to be cut from the page, there is no way to get a poster centered within a border.  The best you could do is set (for example) a 1" border in the print driver.  That way, it can't print any closer to the edge of the paper than 1 inch.  Of course, that reduces the amount of space that can be printed on each page.  I do have some changes/upgrades to the poster feature slated for the future that will make them much easier to use.

Mike

Thanks Mike.
I'll try again making sure I doublecheck all the settings.

Marco.

Mike, I still can not get the print centered in the virtual page.

The first image attached shows the Qimage setup, the second one the print result.
This was a 2x2 print, the top print is bottom right, the bottom print is bottom left.

What I would like to have is a situation where the print would be centered horizontally on the virtual page, so that it would be possible to create a multi-pane installation directly without page-trimming.

That's why I was asking if it could be added as a feature the definition of the internal margin.


Thanks, Marco.


(http://www.hairyotter.com/RndImg/Capture.JPG)


And this is the result:
(http://www.hairyotter.com/RndImg/img001.jpg)

I see from your screen shots that the crop button is up.
To get an equal split of the image into 4 segments, you need to have the crop button down so the image fills the printable area. This will, of course, affect the aspect ratio of the finished print and crop some of the image. That's the compromise that has to be made at present.

There is a rather tedious way to do what you want (I've done it in the past) by making 4 individual crops of the image. This can be done in the batch Filter and taking great care to get the pixel numbers exactly right in the crop.
If you want to follow this up, come back and I can explain in detail.

Otherwise we have to wait for MIke
Terry

Sure, I have lots of things planned for posters but what I was telling you is that for now, you can get a border around the final print if you just add margins.  For example, if you want a 1 inch border around the entire poster, make sure the page margins are 1 inch.  But... you'll still have to trim the panels that didn't fill an entire page.

Mike

Thanks Mike.
As you have correctly explained, the internal margin is easy enough to fix.

What I really need right for the application I have in mind is really a centered printing, which at this point is not available in Qimage.
And Thank you Terry as well.

I did think about cropping, but in this application that is not acceptable either alas.
I will need to decide if I want to do the super-tedious split by hand or what.

Thank you for your answers.
Marco.