How to print a calendar bigger than one page
To print a calendar bigger than your printer's paper, tile it: enlarge one PDF page across several sheets, trim the overlaps and tape them together from the back. The free Acrobat Reader does this with its Poster option. Set the scale to about 180%, not 200%, and four sheets of A4 or Letter become one wall calendar almost twice the width and height of the original.
Use the Poster option in Acrobat Reader
Adobe documents the feature for the free Reader: in the Print dialog, choose Poster under Page Sizing & Handling. Reader works out how many sheets the page needs, and Adobe's tiling guide lists the settings that matter:
- Tile Scale: how much to enlarge the page.
- Overlap: how far each tile repeats its neighbour's edge. A quarter inch (about 6 mm) leaves room to trim and tape.
- Cut marks: guides that show where to trim.
- Labels: the file name and page number printed on each tile.
The preview updates as you change the scale. Watch the sheet count there before you press Print.
200% is the one scale to avoid
The obvious number is the wrong one. At 200%, an A4 page becomes exactly A2: 420 × 594 mm. Two A4 sheets side by side are also 420 mm wide, and the overlap alone uses some of that, before your printer's margins take more. Two sheets can't cover it. The poster spills into a third column and a third row: nine sheets, mostly white strips.
Back off to 180% and the page becomes 378 × 535 mm. With a 6 mm overlap, two A4 sheets across cover that as long as your printer's left and right margins add up to less than about 18 mm. The preview tells you: if it says four sheets, you're there. The same works for Letter: 180% makes a 15.3 × 19.8 inch calendar from four Letter sheets.
If the preview still says six or nine, lower the scale a few percent until it reads four.
Pick the page you'd read from across the room
Tiling makes one page big, so tile the page that needs it. A year on one page is the natural candidate: at A4 the 12 months are small enough to squint at, and at 180% they read from the other side of a desk. A single month tiled to 535 mm tall gives day cells big enough to write a week's plans in.
Our calendars tile cleanly because they're drawn, not photographed. The PDFs are text and hairlines with no embedded images, so enlarging them doesn't blur anything. The lines get thicker in proportion, which suits a calendar you read from a distance. A decorated template built from a low-resolution image goes soft at the same scale. The same restraint is why they're cheap to print: four sheets of a text-and-lines page still use very little ink.
Line up the grid, not the paper
The seams will cross the calendar grid, usually through the middle of a month. That's fine if the lines meet.
- Print with cut marks on.
- On each sheet that overlaps another, trim along the cut mark on the overlapping edges only. Leave the other edges whole.
- Lay the trimmed sheet over its neighbour and slide it until the grid lines run straight across the seam. Align the lines, not the paper edges: the grid is what has to look continuous.
- Tape the seam from the back, the full length.
Then hang it like any other wall calendar. Four taped sheets are heavier than one, so use more anchor points.
Start from a file at your paper size
Tiling scales up from the page you give it, so start from a PDF that matches your paper. An A4 file tiled onto Letter, or the reverse, adds a mismatch on top of the scaling. Poster sits beside Fit and Actual size in the same dialog, so the scale you type is the scale you get. Leave it there rather than switching back to Fit, for the reasons in fit to page vs actual size.
We don't export A3 or anything bigger. Most home printers can't print it, and a vector PDF doesn't need it. Every calendar we make comes in A4, A5 and Letter, monthly or a year on one page, for $19 once. Tile the one you want across four sheets.