Adventures in Printing a Single Page...

OS X 10.6 - See the PPD selector third from top...

So last night I needed to create a design for the physical portion of my iPad project.  This involved sketching out some mechanical designs in my note book.

This is standard fair - simple 8.5" x 11" graph paper.

So I sketched out my design.

Next step is to get it into the computer so that I can trace over it in an ancient  CS2 version of Illustrator I happen to have lying around.

So I snap a picture with my iPhone.

Once its in the iPhone I have found the easiest way to get camera images directly into the computer is by using an app called "Image Capture".  This runs on the Mac and is located in the Applications folder.

This bypasses all the useless iTunes nonsense involved in accessing images on your iPhone.

You hook up your iPhone and launch "Image Capture".  It perceives the phone as a generic camera devices and presents all the pictures for you to select from.  You simply select the images you want and have it copy them to the hard drive.  So no fiddling about with iTunes.

Once I had my design in Illustrator I completed the tasks at hand.

The final sheet size ended up being 20" x 20".

Since I need this printed at size for manufacturing a prototype I figured I could just tile my way out of trouble.  But not so fast...


For the purposes of iPhone development I had switched from OS X 10.5 to 10.6 on one of my development machines - the same machine that I was using to print the sheet out of Illustrator.  But, low and behold, all the printing options have been buggered completely up.

The first problem was somehow, after years of PPD-less pleasure on the Mac, the old PPD print menu had reappeared.  My heart sank...  PPD's are like - well the worst possible annoyance associated with printing from a computer you can imagine.

So the PPD and printer driver (yes, it the new 10.6 print screens want you to have a printer selected as well) conspire to prevent you from printing anything.  There are now thousands of useless menus to help you print (this is a B/W print job so I don't need all of this...)

So I fiddle about some more - probably spending 20 minutes - surely there must be a way to print tiled output.

Alas, no - apparently in their wisdom at Apple (and perhaps Adobe as well) this option appears to be gone.  Image, someone wanting to print out something with tiling.  I suppose I'll have to run out and buy a large format device...  er, well, perhaps not in this economy...

So now what?

After more fiddling I decide that the best option is to Save the job as PDF and try my luck elsewhere.

Fortunately that still seems to work.

Next up, an old creaky version of Acrobat.

I open my 20" x 20" PDF and hunt around for tiling options.

At least these appear to exist.  So I foolishly figure that I'll set the page size to 11" x 17" (to get the fewest tiles) and print it out...

No luck.

Though in Page Setup I can select printing to 11" x 17" the tiling portion of the print dialog quietly ignores this and prints to 8.5" x 11" - leaving most of what I want to print in the bit bucket on the floor.

More fiddling.

Finally I tell Acrobat that the page size is 8.5" x 11".

I try tiling and finally I get 12 (yes, count'em 12) 8.5" x 11" sheets to cover a 20" x 20" print out.

Nice.

So, with tens of thousands of dollars of computers and software at my disposal this is what I have to go through to print out a large sheet.

For me, though, the reemergence of PPDs is quite simply beyond belief (I touched on PPDs in my "Cloud Printing" post back in September).  I made a lot of money over the years helping people to understand that the last thing that they needed when printing was a PPD.

I remember struggling with Acrobat and PPDs back in 2000 or so (perhaps 1999).  Thinking "what the hell kind of nonsense is this".

Now, of course,  things have come full circle and PPDs are back again...