
You may remember back in the day of Macintosh SE, System 6, ImageWriter, Claris Works and so on that you could print across several pages on a Macintosh and easily make a banner. That beautiful feature has been completely missing since OS X was introduced in 2001.
There is a way to print across multiple pages. Save your document as a PDF file, open it in Acrobat Reader (it’s free), and from there you can print it across multiple pages.
- Firstly, you need to download and install Acrobat Reader. You can download it from here.
- Next you need to save the document that you want to print as a PDF file. To do this open the document in any Application (Pages, Preview etc) go to the normal print dialogue, then from the bottom left ‘PDF’ dropdown menu select ‘save as PDF’.
- Now click on the pdf file that was just saved and select ‘Open with Acrobat Reader’

- In Acrobat reader when you ‘Print’ the document you will now see a will window that gives you lots of options. Select ‘Poster’ (not multiple pages!) and it will print over multiple pages!

Print across multiple pages (Click image to enlarge)
There are lots of other programs that can do this: Tiler, SplitPrint, TilePhotos, but they all cost money. Acrobat Reader is free.
Very helpful. I need this information to make my visual aids in teaching. Thank you.
This really helped for one of my projects, though its good to note for some that it doesn’t print to the very edge of the paper ( for my printer atleast)
All good advice but Adobe Reader doesn’t work with PNG files :(
You can open a PNG file with Preview, then save it as pdf (See step 2 in the article). Then open the pdf in Acrobat Reader.
I was happy to learn of this technique, thank you. In the old PageMaker 7 it was possible to relocate the zero point of the ruler, both vertically and horizontally, in order to get the pages to start at that location. Am I asking too much of Acrobat?
Thanks for this info….pretty stupid of apple to not include this feature………
Unfortunately I’m still confused. Where do you tell it how many pages to print over. if I want something to print landscape or 3 pages where do I tell it the number of pages?