Tiling Images

[LPT]

Hello there! 

I am using Affinity Designer to make dressmaking patterns and trying to figure out a way to tile them onto different page sizes (US Letter, A4 and A0). Can anyone help with this? I've attached an example of what I mean... The same pattern at the same scale prints out over different paper sizes

I've tried searching the forums but to no avail yet. 

Thanks in advance.

LPT

HELICOPTER TOP & TROUSERS A0 Alice & Co PATTERNS.pdf

HELICOPTER TOP & TROUSERS A4 COPYRIGHT Alice & Co PATTERNS.pdf

[Gabe]

Hi @LPT,

Welcome to the forums.

You can do it, but it would be a manual process, unfortunately. You would have to create a slice the size of your paper and then create as many slices as you need, with the exact same size, and position them on the page, like so:

Thanks,

Gabe. 

 

[Alfred]

 

[gdenby]

I'm assuming what is needed is to create a "poster" from tiles of smaller sheets of paper. My only experience with anything like that was to rely on the printer driver or sometimes a stand alone utility to scale up or down the primary document.

There seems to be something else going on from what I can guess from the sample .pdfs. The design has been spread across 3 A0 sheets. I would suppose that this is a size that would be useful in production. Given that A4 is 1/32 the area of a single A0, sending the A0 document to a printer should output 96 pages, many of which would be empty. Seeing that the A4 example is 31 sheets, I suppose some rather complicated math was done to fit the design into those sizes.

US letter size is a different proportion rectangle, and so would be yet another scale. That is, the long side A sizes are 1.4142 of the width, while US letter is 1.2941.

Maybe try this. Make a custom size sheet in affinity big enough accommodate all of the pattern. Assume that sending the file to .pdf output will have the ability to select a sheet size for the tiles, and do an auto-fit. Perhaps for better US letter output, scale the main document pattern objects by .915, being sure the strokes are not set the change with size.

[LPT]

1 hour ago, GabrielM said:

Hi @LPT,

Welcome to the forums.

You can do it, but it would be a manual process, unfortunately. You would have to create a slice the size of your paper and then create as many slices as you need, with the exact same size, and position them on the page, like so:

Thanks,

Gabe. 

 

Thanks @GabrielM - I haven't quite got my head around slicing yet! But I will give this a try. I guess the issue would then be if I have to also manually enter all the page codes and registration markers? Is there any way I could at least part automate that process? 

 

[LPT]

23 minutes ago, gdenby said:

I'm assuming what is needed is to create a "poster" from tiles of smaller sheets of paper. My only experience with anything like that was to rely on the printer driver or sometimes a stand alone utility to scale up or down the primary document.

There seems to be something else going on from what I can guess from the sample .pdfs. The design has been spread across 3 A0 sheets. I would suppose that this is a size that would be useful in production. Given that A4 is 1/32 the area of a single A0, sending the A0 document to a printer should output 96 pages, many of which would be empty. Seeing that the A4 example is 31 sheets, I suppose some rather complicated math was done to fit the design into those sizes.

US letter size is a different proportion rectangle, and so would be yet another scale. That is, the long side A sizes are 1.4142 of the width, while US letter is 1.2941.

Maybe try this. Make a custom size sheet in affinity big enough accommodate all of the pattern. Assume that sending the file to .pdf output will have the ability to select a sheet size for the tiles, and do an auto-fit. Perhaps for better US letter output, scale the main document pattern objects by .915, being sure the strokes are not set the change with size.

Thanks @gdenby - yes we use a specialist pattern drafting software to make the patterns and it has an automated function to tile itself into different paper sizes. The problem is sometimes we do not like the way it tiles! Also we need sometimes to make slight changes to the original pattern and add text labels and extra information to pages which we do in Affinity, but it is hard to see where we are putting things when it is all already split up and we have to repeat ourselves over 3 different documents which leaves a lot of room for human error! 

Ideally we would be able to open/import the whole pattern with all it's pieces in Affinity, do any fiddling we need to create a 'master', and then split it into the different page sizes... 

[Gabe]

I'm afraid we do not have a "poster" option. So any sort of adjustment work would have to be manually done. 

[LPT]

ok thanks for clarifying @GabrielM - do you know if there are any plans to include this in future? Or might this be a function in Affinity Publisher?

 

[Gabe]

It's not something that I'm aware of. It's always worth putting it on the feature requests page: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feature-requests-feedback/