Once again I found a valuable on-line tool that I have bookmarked forever.  I wanted to create a banner for a building that I own in Heber City.  I’m putting the downstairs offices up for rent, and wanted to post information about the rental in the front window … in large letters as a banner.    BlockPosters is an amazing, yet simple, application that allows you to take any image that you have, enlarge it, and split it up into “printer-sized” pages.

My friend James pointed me to this when I asked him about cheap software that would allow me to create some banners on my laser printer.  He remembered seeing the application, and it is simple and works.  It will work with any type of image … text, photos, etc.  You visit the website, upload your image file (up to 1MB in size) and then get to choose the parameters of your output – portrait or landscape, how many pages horizontally, the overall resulting size – and then after accepting the preview it produces a .PDF file that contains the pages that make up your picture.  You can take that, and print it on any printer that you choose, trim the pages, and tile them together.

It is applications like this one that convince me of the value of hosted services.  This is such a simple and clean solution.  And it’s free!  I’ve now got my banner for my office, and I’m thinking of trying this with some photos next … just to see how well it will work on my color inkjet printer.