Printing Long Things

[Bic-B@ll]

So I'm kinda into last.fm and they have an API that allows external applications to use user's data. One of them is called Last Graph:

http://lastgraph3.aeracode.org/

Which creates a badass chart based on the volume of songs you've listen to by artist. So I thought it would be badass to turn the chart into a wall poster, which I did:

http://zeroproof.com/bicball/musicwave.jpg

However it was no easy task whatsoever. I had to begin with a PDF of the chart. I found some free program that would let me turn the pdf into a jpg by printing the pdf and choosing the program as my printer. I picked a high resolution and got a somewhat big jpg. It took a long time but it worked for the most part. From there I'm stuck with a wide-ass jpg. I can't find any program to split a picture across multiple pages. I resorted to manually resizing the chart until it was wide enough to span a page and then figuring out exactly how tall the chart was per page. Then I sliced the thing up and printed separate pages. Is there some kind of app I can use to make the slicing part easier? Also is there a better way to convert a pdf to a jpg, the one I'm using leaves a watermark.

Once I get it down to a science I wanna have it printed by a good place at a real high dpi (the band names get really small if you listen to a little bit of them) and make a cool poster. The B&W thing is temporary, however I think its still cool.

[e-freak]

use photoshop. it can import PDFs with no problems at all and you can go for most badass resolutions you want. and don't split it to pages just use a plotter (Din 0 should do the deal)

[Bic-B@ll]

photoshop, atleast 7, has issues opening pdf files, especially when they're giant, it creates crazy lines and messes areas up totally like this:

i dont know what you're talking about at the end there, do you mean use a printer that prints on a long spool of paper? i dont have one of those.

[e-freak]

no there are special printers availble for printing in A0 (Letterformat^ (in germany we call it DIN for Deutsche Industrie Norm and define everything with it). we have one in our church-community to print out posters for our events and stuff and you can easily print paper with up to 1 meter length.

[Bic-B@ll]

so then yes. i dont have one, we had one in high school but it was super low res and i cant get access to it again, maybe in college. i want to make some nice ones on a regular printer before i get anything done professionally if i ever do.

[e-freak]

There have been some internet service where you could rasterize your oversize picture into A4 pages, don't know the exact url but you should easily find it via google (i remember some guy from school having the spagetthi monster poster printed on 16 A4 pages)

[Pampers]

http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

[e-freak]

exactly, thanks pampers :-)