Tiled printing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

48" wide and 32" tall rasterbation of a photograph of Thomas Taylor diving into a bunker, taken by Paintball 2Xtremes magazine (PB2X.com - Original File http://www.pb2x.com/2007/photogalleries/psp_texas_06/images/Image36.jpg).

Tiled printing, sometimes known as rasterbating, is a feature of many computer programs that enables them to print images larger than a standard page. The program overlays a grid on the printed image in which each cell (or tile) is the size of a printed page and then prints each tile. A person can then arrange the tiles to reconstruct the full image.

Tiled printing has been widespread since the days of mainframe computers. Programs were available to convert images to ASCII art that, when printed large enough and viewed sufficiently far away, appeared to be smoothly shaded.

Another form of tiled printing, inspired by continuous feed printers, involves making a long message of letters, possibly with inline graphics of the same height, and printing it sideways over several pages to make a banner. This type of printing is usually associated with The Print Shop, a 1980s software package.

Inexpensive ink jet printers now allow people to make tiled printouts that do not sacrifice the original image's resolution. These decorations are sometimes called rasterbations, after a popular tiled printing program, "The Rasterbator."

[edit] World Records

Rasterbation is often the subject of record-breaking attempts to create the largest and most impressive tiled prints. The title of the world's largest rasterbation was previously held by "the Doomtech crew" [1]. However, in June 2007 the graduating class of the University of Toronto Schools, a Toronto high school, produced a rasterbation incorporating 1462 sheets of 8.5"x14" legal-sized paper [2]. This achievement surpassed the previous record by over two hundred sheets.