Exact (or near exact) printing sizes

[Dave2002]

I have a whole bunch of tools for editing - text and photos.

Sometimes I get an image which I really would like to have printed to a particular scale, so that it prints out on standard size paper.
For example, today I wanted to get a printout of the Glyndebourne seating plan. When I printed it it came out on 4 sheets of A4.
I should have saved it to PDF, previewed it, and realised that this would happen.

This should be trivial - and indeed after a bit of faffing around I managed to reduce the image to quarter size and print it. It still took me about 10 minutes though.

Sometimes I really do want to get a print out of (as close as possible) the exact size - for example if I wanted to make a ruler out of a print out. Is this something which some packages can do much better than others - or do they all fall down? Obviously if I make a diagram using "exact" sizes, then I wouldn't want the printer drivers to rescale.

Automatic scaling sometimes gets in the way. For images scaling by factors of 2 is usually the best - if appropriate - as it does not requre major resampling of the images, but other factors are possible, and some packages do complicated rescaling to get the best results. Calculating image sizes base on pixel counts and pixel sizes does work, but is a bit of a pain. Just doing the WYSIWYG approach (dragging the image) is OK, but not accurate.

Currently I have:

Preview - Mac OS - Sierra
Adobe Photoshop Elements 14
Affinity Designer and Photo
Open Office

and a tool which I use perhaps a couple of times a year - Appleworks (no longer available).

[Frances_iom]

those locked in walled gardens usually find life restrictive - try 'Convert' on any Linux machine near you

[Dave2002]

those locked in walled gardens usually find life restrictive - try 'Convert' on any Linux machine near you

Thanks. I'll look into that.

Another application I remembered - clothes patterns - it is obviously important to get the printing done as accurately as possible. No good if some "clever" automatic resizing "agent" in the link between the software and the printer resizes the output, or if the software used for processing can't work in real world units.

[french frank]

When I printed it it came out on 4 sheets of A4.
I should have saved it to PDF, previewed it, and realised that this would happen.

Which table were you using? I downloaded a pdf and it prints as one page. Or why not take a screenshot of exactly what you want and print that to 'fill entire paper'?

[MrGongGong]

those locked in walled gardens usually find life restrictive - try 'Convert' on any Linux machine near you

Open Office (or even Photoshop)
Hardly "locked" or "walled garden"
Turn off automatic everything, work out what are the right proportions and save those as a pre-set or write them down on a piece of paper which you stick on the wall next to the printer

[Dave2002]

Which table were you using? I downloaded a pdf and it prints as one page. Or why not take a screenshot of exactly what you want and print that to 'fill entire paper'?

For this morning's application the "fill the page" method would have worked - but it wasn't that critical - just irritating that I appear to have wasted 4 pages of printing.

For some applications getting the dimensions as close to "right" as possible really is important. There are print profiles for printers to handle colour, yet there don't appear to be profiles for geometry - or maybe there are but I just don't know about them. In days gone by the dpi in printers would have been pretty much fixed, so the calculations needed would simply be to take the pixel sizes of the thing to be printed, then divide by the dpi to get the measurements in inches - or a similar calculation for cms etc. - with a bit of reverse processing to get the pixel sizes to give a particular printed size.

Nowadays with the potential for very fine resolution, I think dpi is more fluid, and might even be treated as a variable by printer drivers. Printer drivers may often do additional processes which we don't think about much depending on what they "know" or think they know about what is to be printed - possibly including interpolation which can improve perceived quality in photos, but how many of us really know what they actually do?

Not many, now, I think.

I could do the calculations which mrgg suggests (msg 5) if I knew what the effective dpi resolution of the printers I use really are.