Tactics for Tiling?

[sfoster71]

Greetings!

As a liberated Adobe user, (may they burn to the ground) one of the most useful features in Illustrator was the ability to "tile" print outs.  Meaning i have an art board 3 or 4 times the size of my paper which it then figures out how to print "automatically" with a slight overlap.  

What is a good tactic to do so in Designer?  (which i love, except for that random "hit print the first time and it crashes" bug)

Thanks!

[loukash]

24 minutes ago, sfoster71 said:

What is a good tactic to do so in Designer?

1. export to PDF
2. print tiles using Acrobat Reader

25 minutes ago, sfoster71 said:

except for that random "hit print the first time and it crashes" bug

Yep, exactly because of this…  

[sfoster71]

the only problem to that is Adobe.  I prefer not to support Artistic Slavery 🙂

[loukash]

3 minutes ago, sfoster71 said:

the only problem to that is Adobe.

I hear you.  I don't have the Reader installed either. But I did a quick web search, and at least on MacOS, this still appears to be the recommended free solution for printing tiles.

VectorStyler – which I have but rarely ever use – also has a tiling option in its Print dialog:
Right now I just tried to place a 640×640 mm PDF/X-4 layout I worked on just recently, but VectorStyler totally messed it up upon "linking" it and then crashed "unexpectedly" (har har!) when trying to print to PDF.

Whereas Designer 2.2.1 has handled the same PDF without a hitch, and printed the tiles to PDF via MacOS Quartz PDFContext flawlessly. (I don't have a printer handy at the moment.)

So without installing the dreaded Acrobat Reader, this would likely be the second best strategy for the time being:

1. save early save often, especially before invoking that Print dialog
2. virtually print the tiles from Affinity to multipage PDF first
3. then print the PDF tiles using whatever PDF viewer you prefer; on Mac the Preview.app will usually do just fine

[loukash]

Another "hypersafe" tactic would be:

1. save your afdesign document
2. create an afpub document with pages sized to match your printer
3. place the afdesign instances on the pages and create tiles manually
4. export PDF
5. print the PDF using a viewer that doesn't suc… er, crash

Also a possibile workflow/workaroud which I've experimented with before:
Use multiple nested/stacked/overlapping print page-sized artboards in Designer to sort of mimic "slices", then export them individually rather than the main artboard. 
Perhaps even using slices in the Export persona may work, but I haven't used this persona in a long time so I don't remember all its features and quirks.

[thomaso]

Below a workaround with slices. You need to draw every slice manually, unfortunately it seems you can't copy a slice and the displayed unit in the Transform Panel sticks to pixels, regardless of your ruler setting … but you may enter/type any unit when defining a slice (e.g. "100 mm" or a calculation like "80 cm / 3").

For instance: exported with bleed + print marks, one PDF per slice (below combined in Acrobat to one PDF)

The alternative workaround with several artboards requires to copy the layout on every artboard. The artboards don't need to overlap, using bleed is sufficient.

[loukash]

4 hours ago, thomaso said:

The alternative workaround with several artboards requires to copy the layout on every artboard.

You can turn the main artboard content into a symbol object (which is a nondestructive process) and duplicate it as many times as needed.
In fact, you can have a "master artboard" as your primary "workspace", and use Symbol clones to lay them out as needed. All changes to the "master" will be automatically updated in the Symbol clones
Been there done stuff like that before, e.g. for printing four A6 flyer instances on an A4 sheet.

[NotMyFault]

Another method:

1. Export your file as PNG or TIFF
2. Create new file
3. Create a rectangular shape
4. Power duplicate it for every column (e.g. 3 times to get 4)
5. Select all, power duplicate for every row (e.g. 2 times to get 3)
6. select all rectangles
7. Use fill tool, set mode to bitmap, and open the exported image.
   It will be parted into the tiles you defined.
8. Use export Persona to export those layers as separate files, ready for printing in any app you like

 

 

[loukash]

Another free tiling method on Mac which I actually was aware of before but was reminded of it while searching Teh Webz for more ideas on this topic:

1. place the large image/PDF into the Numbers app onto a blank sheet
2. Format tab → Arrange → Original Size → Position: 0/0
3. Print → Content Scale: 100%

As far as I can tell though, there will be no actual overlap using Numbers.

The sad thing is that as far as I vaguely recall, tiling used to be a standard option in the Classic Mac OS print dialog. I'll have to check my ShapeSheeper OS 9 virtualization if it's true.
(Even more sad: my PowerMac G4 that could still boot OS 9 died a few months ago…  Hopefully the beige G3 and the PowerBook 1400 will still boot…)

[walt.farrell]

16 hours ago, sfoster71 said:

one of the most useful features in Illustrator was the ability to "tile" print outs.

Can't you simply choose Tiled when Printing? E.g.,  on my Mac, I would choose Tiled vs the default Single for the Document Layout Mode.

[thomaso]

On 10/28/2023 at 7:43 PM, walt.farrell said:

Can't you simply choose Tiled when Printing?

The OP (+ the first response) seems to experience crashes, though it's unclear with what print setting:

On 10/28/2023 at 3:42 AM, sfoster71 said:

random "hit print the first time and it crashes" bug

[loukash]

On 10/28/2023 at 7:43 PM, walt.farrell said:

on my Mac, I would choose Tiled vs the default Single for the Document Layout Mode

Of course, but the Affinity Print dialog on Mac was always very prone to crashes. Hence also my advice to export to PDF first and print via the free Acrobat Reader which has always worked reliably for tiling (provided one is willing to let all the Adobe junk to contaminate one's hard drive…)

On MBA 15" – which you now also have – so far I have used the Affinity 2.2.1 print dialog only once while testing it in this thread, so fingers crossed that Serif may have fixed at least some of these issues in the meantime.

[Boldlinedesign]

On 10/27/2023 at 10:37 PM, loukash said:

VectorStyler – which I have but rarely ever use – also has a tiling option in its Print dialog:
Right now I just tried to place a 640×640 mm PDF/X-4 layout I worked on just recently, but VectorStyler totally messed it up upon "linking" it and then crashed "unexpectedly" (har har!) when trying to print to PDF.

Did you send in the troublesome file to the vectorstyler developer and explain the issue? Chances are, he will have a fix for it by the time the next build is released in a week or two. Are you using the new beta recently released? There have been a ton of fixes in that update.

No one ever claimed Vectorstyler is perfect. Instead of laughing because it failed in this instance, why not help it improve? In a world where Adobe unfortunately pervasivly dominates the market, the more we can do to encourage alternative options should always be encouraged. It's ok to use and appreciate both programs. 

[loukash]

@Boldlinedesign you're off topic here. No further comments on my part.

 

[Boldlinedesign]

@loukash encouraging you to send the problem file in to the developer to see that the issue gets fixed instead of laughing at it (even as affinity also crashes with the same problem) is "off-topic"?  I'm not sure I follow your your thinking. Reporting the issues sounds more like the mature way to handle it. Why are you gleeful when something fails in Vectorstyler? You paid for the program didn't you? Even if you use it sparingly, it's allowed you to do work you'd otherwise be unable to do in affinity alone. Why not support the development as well?

I do defend Vectorstyler because for some reason, some affinity users view it as a threat instead of another helpful tool in their design process. I also cheer every affinity improvement update and want it to succeed because I appreciate there being multiple solid options to replace illustrator. If affinity had all the features I needed for my daily work, it would have had a better chance of being my primary vector design program. 

[lacerto]

On Windows there is less junk than on macOS (since universal binaries are not needed), but still not enough to include meaningfully arranged 0s and 1s to read printer margins when tiling (here 5mm additional overlap was meant to be included). 

It may be printer specific whether tiling option is available via Preview on macOS (Sonora checked) but it was not for my Xerox so it seems that some further junk needs to be installed, and to avoid mental issues, little cash might also need to be spent. On Windows the free (Lite) version of PDF/X-Change might be able to do tiling, the low-cost perpetual license version at least is, and does it properly.

[loukash]

12 minutes ago, lacerto said:

It may be printer specific whether tiling option is available via Preview on macOS (Sonora checked)

I've actually checked the Preview print dialog as far back as my PowerBook G4 running Leopard, but no dice. There may have existed a 3rd party plugin enabling tile printing on old OS X though. I don't remember. (Of course, I still have Acrobat Pro X on my El Capitan MacBooks, so personally I'm set even if Affinity should start crashing again.)