How to tile PDF using PDFPoster

Problem

I have a PDF file with a single page that I want to print as a large poster (say size A1). However, I do not have an A1 printer. I only have the common A4 printer.

So, I would like to cut up the PDF page into multiple smaller pages so that I can print them out on my A4 printer and paste them together into a A1 poster.

Solution

This seems like a messy problem requiring grunt work. Thankfully, there is a simple tool that solves this problem: PDFPoster!

• Installing it is easy:

$ sudo apt install pdfposter

• Just specify the size of your printer and the intended size for your PDF and it does the job. For example, say I have an A4 printer but I need to print an A1 size poster:

$ pdfposter -mA4 -pA1 in.pdf out.pdf

The output PDF contains 9 pages that I can print on A4 pages, arrange as a 3x3 grid to get my A1 poster! 😄

Tried with: PDFPoster 0.6.0-1 and Ubuntu 14.04