If you have a poster that you need to print for a presentation or for advertising events on campus, then you can make use of the resources made available by Central Services for the Trinity community, located at the lower level of Williams Memorial. Central Services can produce full-color poster-sized printouts, suitable for presentations, advertising events and poster sessions.  Their poster printer offers high-resolution output, that clearly renders photographs, graphics and text. Anyone requiring services must provide their department's billing account number or, alternatively, students can pay with bantam bucks. For billing account numbers, please contact your department head or administrative assistant.

There will be times when you have a document that you need to scan for your class or for your personal use. Once you have done this, you realize that there is a lot of unnecessary empty space on the document and you decide to crop it. Now, when you go to print it, you see wasted portions of a piece of paper.

The process of cropping a page in Acrobat Pro is a simple one. When you crop a page in Acrobat, it is similar to taking a pair of scissors and cutting off portions of the document. The effect is that you are left with a reduced size document. Instead of your document being a printable 8.5" X 11", it is now an awkward 6.48" X 7.15." Not only do you have an odd border to your printed page, but you are also wasting space. By resizing your pdf file in photoshop you will be resizing your document to a printable 8.5" X 11", and increasing the size of the document's contents.

First, open the document you intend to resize in Adobe Photoshop. You can do this by right clicking on the icon of your document, selecting Open With and selecting Adobe Photoshop.*

Once Photoshop has opened your file, you will be met with a smaller window that was thumbnails of each page within your document (in this example-15). At the top of this window select Pages to view your document as pages.

Now you must highlight every thumbnail. To do this you can press the Command (if you are working on a Mac platform) or the Control (if you are working on a Windows platform) on your keyboard and click on each thumbnail until all of them are selected.

After doing this, you will have to deselect the option that says Constrain Proportions and then type in the desired image size (in this example 8.5" X 11" [the average page size]) that you would like. You can locate this by referring yourself to the red and blue arrows in the image below, respectively. Select Ok at the bottom right hand corner of that window.

Photoshop will now be opening each individual page of your PDF document in a separate Photoshop window. At this point you have successfully resized your document pages to your desired size. However, you now need to reformat them into a single PDF file. To do this simply click File, Automate, & PDF Presentation.

A new window will open. Select the option to Add Open Files & Multi-Page Document. At this point make sure that the numbers at the end of the names are in order. If they are not, simply drag and drop the first page to the top of the list, and continue until they are in numeric order. Click Save. You can view this process in the following image by looking at the Red arrow and the Blue Arrow, respectively.

A new window will open asking you to name and indicate where you want this file to be saved. Choose your location and click save. After this a new window will open. If you would like to view the final resized document select the option to View PDF After Saving. You do not need to do anything else now but click Save PDF.

Congratulations! You have now resized your PDF document into an appropriate dimension for printing. Remember you can save anything to a PDF format, and therefore resize almost anything to a printable size. For further information on saving your document in PDF format, please refer to my previous blog entry - PDF Files or Dobromir's - Save anything in PDF!

If you have any questions about this, or any other STA Blog Post, please feel free to contact us or leave a comment.

*note: If you do not have Adobe Photoshop installed on your computer, you can use this program in the Faculty Instructional Technology Center (FITC) in the library.

Here is a simple trick that will help you print a large format poster (let's say 2 ft by 3 ft) on multiple sheets of paper of smaller size so that in the end you could paste them together to have your poster. This becomes very useful when a large format printer is not available or the cost of printing such a poster is too expensive.

For this purpose we're going to use Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is not a free software though, but is available on all computers in the Blume Language Lab on Level 1 in the library at Trinity College.

Follow these simple steps in order to print your poster on multiple sheets of paper:
1. Open Adobe Acrobat Pro
2. Open your document in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Your document could be a pdf file, a picture or a Word document. In any case, if the file you selected to open is not a pdf file, Adobe Acrobat Pro is going to convert it to pdf.
3. Go to File->Print
4. Look under the Page Scaling menu and select "Tile all pages". You are going to see in the small Preview box how your document is split up across multiple pages.
5. At this point you should try various percentages for the Tile Scale box until you're happy with what the preview is showing you.
Note: The Preview box also displays information about the expected width and height of the resulting poster. Use that as a guideline to have an idea of the proportions of the poster.

6. Press OK in the printing menu. The printer should start printing all the tiles of the poster.
7. After the pages are printed, put the tiles together and use an xacto tool to cut the edges of each tile.
8. In order to bind the tiles together you could use scotch tape to joing the edges of the tiles together.
9. That's it! Enjoy your poster!