Trying to span a large printout across multiple pages

[gr8gonzo]

I have a design in Illustrator CS (Windows) that is about 41" wide by 16" tall.

I want to print this design across a series of 6 sheets of legal-sized paper, on a standard laser printer, and re-assemble the design later by taping the sheets to each other. I am currently using the tiling option in the print menu, set up to use 3 pages wide by 2 pages tall.

However, since it's a standard laser printer, we run into problems with bleed. The printer has a bleed/margin of about 0.2 inches, so if I try to print these out, trim off the white bleed/margin, and put them together, then the re-assembled image will have missing pieces.

Can anyone help me get this to print properly on our laser printer so I can re-assemble it without losing pieces of the image? I have no problem if each page needs to be shrunken a small bit, but I did design this layout with the bleeds in mind (full bleed would have been 42" by 17").

Thank you!

- Jonathan

 

[Raider1983]

Not sure if this will help but my inkjet does the same thing (a white border all around the image) but the drawing starts up on the next page where it left off on the first. If I trim off the margin one page and lay it on the clear margin, the drawing lines match up. May be different for a laser printer though. Also noticed you can reduce the bleed margin to .125 which may save paper.

 

[fixumdude]

You are probably looking for the "Tile Imagable Areas" option instead of the "Tile Full Pages" option. In Illustrator CS it's on the print menu. Click "Print" then click "Setup" on the left hand side of the print window and under "Options - Tiling" on the right choose the "Tile Imagable Areas". This will make Illustrator account for the unprintable area on the edge of the page when tiling your design.