Photo 1.9.2 tiled print dialog gives bizarre results MacOS

[dcortesi]

MacOS 10.14/Mojave, Affinity Photo 1.9.2. Can't make tiled printing work.

 I have a panorama, 1450px by 8500px, so about 1:6. I thought I would try printing it tiled, assuming it would end up as about 6 Letter sheets. File>Print.  Range:Entire Doc, Fit:Fit to Printable, Orientation:Landscape. So far so good (pic1).

Document Layout, Mode:Tiled. Preview shows it plans to do 30 tiles, with apparently a wide white left border. Ignoring "Fit to Printable" well ok maybe that makes sense. Try "Shrink to Printable" no change.

Back to Range&Scale, set Fit Type:Scaled and scale:15% (arbitrary choice). Now the preview shows it will print 3 pages (not unreasonable) consisting of small blue squares on a white ground. 

There is some kind of bug here, is it only in the preview of a tiled print? I print to PDF and open in Preview. Nope, the print dialog preview was accurate, there's my tiled print, 3 blue squares (pic4).

Suggestions welcome!

 

[Joachim_L]

Do yourself a favour and print documents to be tiled from a PDF reader and do not use the tile function in the Affinity applications. I wonder if Serif EVER printed e.g. an A0 with lots of white space on A4 paper. Having an overlap gets you nowhere without additional marks for cropping or placing.

[dcortesi]

So you are saying, give up on the feature of tiled printing? But it is a documented feature, I'm looking at it in the Affinity Help. Surely they thought it worked?

I'm wondering (since you mention A0 and A4) if the problem is the paper size I'm setting. Should I be setting the target size instead of the physical size? Since the Help says "Tiled: your page can be printed to a large format (e.g., posters, banners, etc.)" maybe I should be telling it the size I want to achieve? But then how would it know the available paper (the "tile") size?  And in any case, a picture with an aspect ratio of 1:6 fits on no standard stationery. What I expected to achieve was 6 letter-size tiles adding up to a 66-inch wide banner.

p.s. I don't understand what you mean by "overlap" and I've no interest in having white space.

[kanihoncho]

The tile function needs to be looked at. They should look at how Illustrator tiles. This tile function prints out WAYYYY too many pages. You can't orient the printed paper selection. I have to create a second file and rotate my horizontal files to a vertical format in order to use less paper. Illustrator lets you change the paper rotation and move the file image to reduce the required number of pages. At least that's how it used to work . . .

[loukash]

Works for me, however I'm not printing to paper (no reason to waste paper or toner at this time) but to PDF for now.

The "trick" is to forget about the absolute pixel dimensions for a while, set the image DPI resolution so that it matches the printer DPI, and then set the document units to whichever physical units you prefer, cm in my case.
Set orientation to Automatic and make sure to actually reselect it from the popup menu to reset any previous printing attempts. (Smells like a bug to me.)
Set overlap to something reasonable if you actually want to glue the tiles together. 1 or 2 cm is good enough for me.
Add bleed and cut marks if your printing from APu/ADe with bleed.

So, starting with this (either resample or not, whatever you need):

Printing like this (to PDF):

Reassembling the 8-page PDF in ADe as if I'd glued the 8 printed A4 pages together like this, looks fine to me:

[loukash]

3 hours ago, dcortesi said:

the paper size I'm setting. Should I be setting the target size instead of the physical size?

The Paper Size menu is the physical size of the sheet of paper you're feeding into your printer. Unless you have an A0 monster machine filling up the half of your living room, in Europe this would usually be A4.

[loukash]

Oh, and keep the scale at 100%. The reason your PDF print looks the way it looks is the "15%".

[dcortesi]

OK, @loukash has it right. The Aff.Photo help file is woefully lacking information on this, including the key fact that you have to set the Document Size to the target image dimensions before you go to the Print dialog. (I had supposed that the Print dialog would figure out what I wanted itself, but no.)

To do tiled printing, you must use Document>Resize Document to set the document dimensions to the desired print size of the image.

First, while the Resize Document dialog contains the actual pixel dimensions of the image, work out the aspect ratio of the final image. For example, I have a panorama that is originally 8559x1441, a ratio of 5.939:1. I would like to end up with a printed panorama that is 8 inches tall, and therefore, (5.939*8) 47.9 inches wide.

In Resize Document I set the units to inches, and the dimensions to 47.9 x 8, and tick Resample.

Set the DPI to as near to what your printer does as possible, probably 400 (which is the maximum allowed in the dialog).

Click Resize. The pixel layer is now resized. This is a change of the actual document. If you save it, it will have this size on disk. So, either don't save it, or save it as a different name, or Edit>Undo the change before saving.

Now you can go to the Print dialog. Under Range and Scale, set Range: entire document; Fit type: scale 100%; Orientation (as appropriate -- Automatic did NOT choose landscape for an image that was 6x as wide as it was tall).

Under Document Layout choose Model: Tiled. The preview should now show an appropriate number of tiled images, and you can scroll through them. 

Select PDF:Open in Preview (on a Mac) and you should shortly have the printed page-tiles to inspect in Preview.

Thanks again @loukash

 

[loukash]

2 hours ago, dcortesi said:

400 (which is the maximum allowed in the dialog)

You can type any crazy DPI number you want. It's just the slider that stops at 400… And likely for good reason.

2 hours ago, dcortesi said:

Automatic did NOT choose landscape for an image that was 6x as wide as it was tall

Because the paper orientation has nothing to do with the final format.
As my example image above was 45 cm tall, I'd get nowhere with A4 paper set to landscape because two sheets would only  add up to 42 cm. Hence it has wisely chosen portrait.