MINSULA PRINT LAB / FIELD NOTES

Assemble a four-page craft stencil

Our botanical drawing becomes a larger paper stencil when printed at 360 × 288 mm. It will not fit on one A4 sheet. Tile mode keeps that physical size and divides the image across pages instead of shrinking it.

Plan the four sheets

Choose A4 portrait, 10 mm margins, 10 mm overlap and the verification line. Each tile has a 190 × 265 mm image window. The next column starts 180 mm across the original image; the next row starts 255 mm down. This makes a 2 × 2 layout: R1 C1, R1 C2, R2 C1, R2 C2.

The final row contains only the remaining 33 mm of image height plus its duplicated overlap. The rest is intentionally blank. Do not stretch that last strip to fill the page.

Trim, align, then tape

1. Print at 100% and measure the first verification line before assembling.
2. Lay out all four sheets in row order. Keep their labels visible until the arrangement is clear.
3. For each page after the first column, trim its left blank margin and duplicated strip at the dashed vertical line. Place that cut edge against the right image boundary of the preceding page.
4. For the second row, trim at the dashed horizontal line and align it with the bottom image boundary of the row above.
5. Check the botanical stems across both seams, then tape on the reverse.

What the marks mean

Small corner marks identify each usable image window. Dashed lines on later rows and columns identify the end of the duplicated overlap. These are assembly aids and may touch the artwork; the tool does not remove them automatically from a finished stencil.

Check the completed image width is 360 mm. A repeating seam error usually points to a trimming or scaling problem. Keep the original uncut PDF so you can reprint a damaged page without changing the layout.