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!

Show Notes:

• I usually have each episode at least partially scripted out. I’ll typically write out the opening, the closing, and any bits in the middle where I want to make sure I don’t forget a step or (more often) if I just hit a section that doesn’t sound right off the cuff. This one’s completely off the top of my head, and except for a couple of edits where I completely fumbled a phrase or had a particularly long pause to think about what I was going to say, it’s the first take. Not too shabby, although I wish I’d mentioned that I’d turned down the opacity of my brush earlier.
• Speaking of brushes, just about any brush that’s got some texture and slightly roughened edges will work for this. Try out several and find one you like; the watercolor brushes are an obvious choice, of course, but you can get some interesting effects with others as well!
• There’s one more step to these mountains, by the way; in the original map, if you look closely you’ll see that the mountains have snow-covered tops. I’ll cover that next episode.