The printing is the easy half. This is the part that decides whether the finished poster looks made or looks assembled.
Work on a large flat surface. Allow more time than you think for a poster above about twelve sheets.
1. Sort before you cut
Lay every sheet out in its grid position, face up, before a blade touches anything.
If you turned on page numbers, the labels in the margin tell you where each sheet belongs. If you did not, sort now by matching the artwork — and turn them on next time.
Check for missing sheets at this point, while the export is still open and reprinting one is trivial.
2. Decide whether you are cutting or overlapping
Two assembly methods, and they need different cuts.
Butt-joining — no overlap
Cut every sheet on its cut line, on all four sides, and place the trimmed edges against each other.
- Cleanest result when your cutting is accurate.
- Unforgiving: a cut a millimetre inside the line leaves bare paper, which reads as a white line on the finished poster.
- Use a guillotine or a craft knife and a steel rule. Scissors wander.
Overlapping — the forgiving method
With overlap turned on, each tile prints a strip of its neighbour's content into the margin, so an imperfect cut lands on duplicated image rather than on blank paper.
The strips are printed on the left and top edges of each tile — the side opposite the scissor marks. So:
- Cut sheet A on its right-hand cut line.
- Lay sheet A over sheet B, the sheet immediately to its right.
- B's left-hand strip sits underneath A and fills any gap your cut left.
Work left to right along each row, then top to bottom down the rows, always laying the earlier sheet over the later one. The outer perimeter of the poster has no strip — the first column has no left neighbour and the first row has nothing above it — and those edges are trimmed to the poster boundary anyway.
Overlap is a Pro feature.
3. Cut
- Cut the outer perimeter of the poster last. It is your reference edge while you work.
- Keep the offcuts until the poster is finished. A margin strip is useful for checking alignment and for testing tape.
- Cut in the same direction on every sheet. Consistency matters more than perfection: a uniform half-millimetre error is invisible, an alternating one is not.
4. Lay out and check before taping
Assemble the whole poster loose, without tape, and look at it from two metres away. Seams that look fine at arm's length are the ones that show at distance.
Adjust now. Tape makes adjustment expensive.
5. Tape the back
- Work from the centre outwards, so any accumulated error is pushed to the edges rather than into the middle of the image.
- Tape the back, not the front. Tape on the front catches light and shows in every photograph.
- Run tape along the whole length of each seam rather than in dabs. Dabs let the seam open as the paper relaxes.
- Matte tape if you have it.
For a poster that will be handled, tape the front seams as well with a clear matte tape, or mount the whole thing to a backing board.
6. Mounting
Foam board and spray adhesive give the flattest result. Work in the same centre-outwards order, and keep a squeegee or a soft cloth moving ahead of the sheet to avoid bubbles.
If a seam shows a white line
That is a cutting issue rather than a printing one, and there is a page for it: white gaps when taping tiled prints together.