Printing Your Pattern
How to Poster Print a PDF at Home
PDF means Portable Document Format. It's the most common format for document transmission in the world ... almost anything can be made into a PDF so that anyone can read it, online or off. They are useful as a single format for printing documents across all computer platforms, so many people now use them for sending and printing clothing blocks and patterns.
My printable blocks and patterns are created in CAD (in my case Corel Draw) in larger pages than your average printer, so to print these at home on an A4 or US Letter printer you will need either a CAD program or a utility program like Adobe Acrobat Reader or Foxit.
PDFs are the easiest if you're not into editing CAD files. You simply open the PDF in your reader and print it using poster print settings.
Download the Acrobat Reader Install from Adobe
or Download the Foxit Install from Foxit
Once you have a PDF reader installed, open the PDF file for your block or pattern. Open the Layers tab in the reader and look at all the layers on each page. Some will be different sizes for tops or bottoms, some will be optional features, some will be size tables, and so on. Layers have two views ... visible or hidden. If you hide a layer it won't get printed ... only visible layers will be printed. So select only the layers you want to print and hide all the rest.
Next click the print icon on the toolbar, select your printer and the number of copies you wish to print.
Now comes the important part ... select POSTER and 100%. You will see a preview of how the print driver has laid out your multi page printing. You can increase or decrease the overlap of the pages, print registration marks or a host of other options depending on your reader. You can even select which pages of the poster to print ... ie; you could choose not to print a page that's blank!
That's it ... click print!
It's really that easy ... and sooo much faster than going out to a copy shop to print it for you.