Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Printing brackets enlarged on multiple pages



For our weekly tournaments on Wednesdays we just print out our tournament brackets on a single sheet of paper.  For our weekend tournaments where we play longer matches and normally have few more people, we like to make a larger bracket that we can display on an easel.  For a long time, we would get foam board, I think 22" by 28", and draw a bracket on it.  This was pretty time consuming since its tricky to make sure all the many lines are evenly spaced and straight and make everything fit just right.

Lately, we've been instead printing out an enlarged version of the bracket that fits on to 4 pages.  It seems like that should be easier to do than it was.  And considering I only do it every many months, I'd forgotten how last time, so I thought I would document the procedure.  I could not find any way to do it in Microsoft Word, so this solution is for PDF.  If you're starting with a Microsoft Word document, as I do, then the first step is to save it as a PDF document.

1) If starting from Word, do a "Save as..." and save as PDF format.

2) Open the PDF with Adobe Acrobat Reader (other PDF Reader programs like FoxIt have ways to do this too)

3) Go to "File/Print..." to open the Print dialog

4) Under "Page Sizing & Handling", click Poster

5) Change the "Tile Scale" to 200%, or some other value.  For us, printing at 200% enlarges the bracket to print on 6 landscape pages (22" x 25.5") instead of just 1 page.  150% would print to 4 pages

We then tape the 6 page print out to the foam board so that we can stand the foam board on the easel. When we write on the bracket with Sharpie marker, it can bleed through and get small dots on the foam board so I definitely wouldn't tape the bracket to the wall if you're using markers on it.

Also, there are tiny margins on the paper when it prints, so we cut those off of at least one side of the papers so that we can tape them together with little to no white gap.

No comments:

Post a Comment