In the near future I hope to rescan, retouch and reformat the old maps so that they too are simple to print. Unfortunately, as they are now, they take a few more steps if you are printing on Letter sized sheets of paper. There may be an easier way to do this (and if you know of one, please let me know) but this is my recommendation after a lot of troubleshooting.


 

You will not be able to use the default Poster mode without printing a significant amount of white space and two additional sheets. This is because Adobe Reader has no option to crop or align the image to one side when printing an A4 page on the smaller US Letter page. It insists on printing six pages with large margins on either side, demonstrated by the picture to the right…

You can still print in Poster mode though, we just have to do so with the Print Current View option. An awkward hack of a crop function, if you will. Here is how I do it:

  1. Turn on a square grid option so you can easily count the dimensions of the image.
  2. Make sure your reader window is not in full-screen mode and you can manipulate the window size.
  3. Under View > Zoom select Fit Height. This will take care of the vertical dimensions.
  4. Click and drag the left or right side of the reader window until you crop off enough of the image that only 22 horizontal inches are in view.
  5. Once the view is correct, open the print dialogue and under Pages to Print > More Options select the Current View option.
  6. Follow the instructions in Step 4 of the Printing Guide, but set the Tile Scale to 200% instead of 100% for a 1″ grid scale. These old maps are at a lower resolution until I rescan them.

When you have set everything correctly, the print preview should correctly be cropped down to four pages rather than the wasteful six in the image above. This is how mine looked:

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Sorry for the trouble! I am learning these lessons as I go. Again, if you know of an easier way to do this, please let me know so I can edit this guide.