Zombie Nirvana Games

I got an email last night from a viewer who has a large map. He wanted to print it across multiple sheets of paper rather than shrinking it down to a single sheet, and asked if there was an easy way to do this in Photoshop.

To be perfectly honest, if there is one, I don’t know what it is and my Googling couldn’t turn one up. What I DID find, though, was a rather nifty little program called PosteRazor.  It takes an image and based on your choices (how many pages to split it into, how big a blank border your printer will create, how much and where to overlap the sheets, etc.) divides it up into a multi-page PDF. Just print the PDF, trim off the borders, and put it together!

It’s free, open source, and available for Windows, OSX, and Linux. It’s also a very small program (the biggest of the three versions is less than 1 MB) and very fast. I tried it out this morning and it works like a charm; it’s definitely worth a look!

On a lark I decided to install Foxit Reader 2.0, a PDF reader. If you’d told me before I tried it just how much faster it is, I don’t think I would have believed you. It’s quick with small PDF’s, but the speed difference with big, graphics-intensive PDF’s is nothing short of amazing.

I tested it out side-by-side, putting it up against Adobe Reader 7.0.9, with the very big (31 MB) very graphics intensive SLA Industries PDF, and the results were simply astonishing. Foxit was able to scroll through the document as fast as I could turn my mouse wheel where Adobe Reader was clipping along like Doom 3 on a Pentium II.

If you’ve got a PDF with fillable forms, Foxit kicks Adobe’s butt as well. With Adobe, if you fill in the forms on a document and want to save a copy, you have to print it. Foxit allows you to save it as a PDF, with the forms filled. (I tested this out on my own Fudge On The Fly NPC Sheet, and it worked beautifully.) This makes it incredibly useful for gaming, particularly with documents like character sheets.

The only thing I’ve found so far that Foxit doesn’t have going for it is an in-browser plugin. But really, most of the time I just end up downloading a PDF so I can read it offline later anyway, so that’s no big deal.

I’m going to try it out for a while longer, but short of some cataclysmic failure, I’ll likely be sticking with it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an Adobe fanboy; Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are my Software Holy Trinity, and as far as making PDF’s, they’re the best. I’ve been increasingly less satisfied with their readers over the last couple of iterations, and Foxit has just gone to prove what it was I’ve been missing all this time.

And it’s free!