Tiled printing

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A tiled printout of Swan Song Records logo.

A tiled printing of a subway station hung in a hallway (source photo)

The largest known rasterbation, by the Doomtech Crew

Tiled printing is a feature of many computer programs that enables them to print images larger than a standard page. The program overlays a grid on the printed image in which each cell (or tile) is the size of a printed page and then prints each tile. A person can then arrange the tiles to reconstruct the full image.

Tiled printing has been widespread since the days of mainframe computers. Programs were available to convert images to ASCII art that, when printed large enough and viewed sufficiently far away, appeared to be smoothy shaded.

Another form of tiled printing, inspired by continuous feed printers, involves making a long message of letters, possibly with inline graphics of the same height, and printing it sideways over several pages to make a banner. This type of printing is usually associated with The Print Shop, a 1980s software package.

Inexpensive ink jet printers now allow people to make tiled printouts that do not sacrifice the original image's resolution. These decorations are sometimes called rasterbations, after a popular tiled printing program, The Rasterbator.