Too many KDE folks refuse to use http://techbase.kde.org/ because it breaks blocks of code.

You can however make it usable. A hint just for you:

What a coincidence today happened. In the morning I used KDEPrint's 'poster' frontend to create a "poor man's poster" in A1 size from 4 A3 printouts.

In the afternoon, a lady mailed me, asking why her KDE print dialog on Solaris didn't show the poster dialog, while her husband's openSUSE KDE did show it.

I took the time, mailed her back what I knew about the question, and included a few screenshots.

Two hours later I thought for myself: "WTF -- you took more than half an hour to write back to this lady and explain everything to her... Why not put another 30 minutes effort into it and convert the mail into a little tutorial to be published in my blog?".

I slightly changed my earlier mail in a few sentences, re-arranged it a bit, and posted a screenshot with a long comment to kdedevelopers.org.

Hardly I was ready with this when I saw a posting by Hin-Tak on the 'printing summit' mailing list over at linux-foundation.com, asking about ... poster again (without remembering the name of the utilitiy). Happily I mailed the link to said image with comments back to him.

And now it's "Heck! I may as well make a real blog post from it, add a few more screenshots and declare it a tutorial...."

So here we go.

You may already have come across the "Poster" tab in KDE's printing dialog. The one the screenshot to the left shows. It should be there for each printer you select from the drop-down list, even the virtual ones, that "Print to File" or "Send to Fax" or "Mail PDF File".
However, the poster tab of kprinter will *NOT* show up if you don't have the "poster" utility installed and in your $PATH. So if you want it, simply install the 'poster' package.

(UPDATE: Seems after Michael Goffioul's patches from 2002 there were more new features added to poster (which I wasn't aware of). There's a bug report 132916 which was pointed out to me in a comment below by jlp. Given that the bug reporter says "version 20060221 doesn't work, while version 20050907 does", it is probably saver to download and use the latter. BTW, openSUSE ships the version 20020826 which works as well. This bug may explain why Gentoo and Debian have reverted to a 1999 version of poster, which does not work with KDEPrint.)

Obtain "poster" from here: ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/printing/.

Important: you need to use the version from the link above, should your distro's version not function properly! It contains some patches to make it work with KDEPrint (poster's commandline abilities don't suffer from these patches!). The patches (written by our deerly missed Michael Goffioul, who currently does have too little time for active KDEPrint development) have also been accepted by the upstream poster developer, years ago.

Unfortunately, some recent distro releases (Debian?, *buntu?) for some reason seem to ship an older version which makes the kprinter poster tab display an error message.

As soon as you install the patched version (compiling it is easy), kprinter will start work with it.

If you figure your distro is using a b0rken version (or no poster package at all), you should contact its respective packager and/or submit a bug report or feature request. Ask them to use the patched version of poster to make it work with KDEPrint.

Shot of preview for two different tiles; you can notice the cut margins as well as the slightly overlapping tile images which allow for small jitter when cropping the printouts.

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...but in this shot there's still not yet any tile selected for printing. Instead, the cut margins have been increased already.

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This shot shows all but one of the 16 A4 tiles selected that make up a (1 square meter excatly!) A0 poster.

The order they will print is the order they were clicked (with the shift key held down), or typed into the line edit.

What benefit is it to make it selectable which tiles print?

Well, you may want to try with two tiles first, and see if they fit and match what you expect. If they do, continue with more tiles, different ones this time. If they don't, change you settings and try again.

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The poster utility and the kprinter tab do also work if you start kprinter as a standalone application (i.e. not from the 'Print...' menu entry of an application) and load a PostScript file into it.

Now how to load a file?

• drag and drop it onto the 'Files' pane, or...
• use the 'Add file' button (top on the right of the pane), or...
• start kprinter with a path to the file as a commandline parameter

(The example above loaded a JPEG image file, though.)

kprinter pre-filter-stacking.png