How to Make a Tarpapel (Free, No App): A4, Long & Short Bond Paper

A tarpapel is the do-it-yourself cousin of the printed tarpaulin: one big design printed across ordinary bond paper, trimmed, and taped into a banner. It costs a few pesos of ink and paper instead of a trip to the print shop, and it is how countless birthday backdrops, classroom posters, school projects and "Welcome" signs get made. The hard part has always been the splitting — cropping the picture page by page in Word or Excel and hoping the edges meet. This guide shows the fast way: upload, choose paper and size, print, cut, tape. No app to install, nothing uploaded.

What You Need

• Your photo or design as a JPG or PNG — the biggest version you have. A phone photo (3,000–4,000 px wide) is plenty for a 3 × 4 ft banner. A design made in Canva or PowerPoint should be exported at the highest quality.
• A printer and paper — Long bond paper (8.5 × 13 in), Short (Letter, 8.5 × 11 in) or A4 all work. Colour inkjet is ideal; a mono laser is fine for text banners.
• Scissors or a cutter, a ruler, and tape or glue. Clear tape on the back is easiest; a glue stick on the overlap strip looks cleaner from the front.
• The free Tarpapel Maker — it runs in your browser on a phone or computer.

Step 1 — Upload the Photo

Open the Tarpapel Maker and drop in your image, or tap the upload box on your phone. The photo is not uploaded anywhere; the splitting and the PDF are generated on your own device, which is why it also works on a slow connection.

Step 2 — Choose Your Paper

Pick the paper size your printer is loaded with. In the Philippines that is usually Long (8.5 × 13 in) or Short (Letter); elsewhere it is A4. Long gives the biggest poster per sheet, so it needs the fewest pages. You can also choose portrait or landscape sheets — the tool recalculates the count instantly, and one orientation is often a few sheets cheaper.

Step 3 — Set the Size

There are two ways to say how big you want the tarpapel:

• By sheets — e.g. 3 across × 4 down. Good when you know how many pages you are willing to print. The tool shows the finished size in cm and feet.
• Exact size — e.g. 3 × 4 ft, 2 × 3 ft, or 60 × 90 cm. Good when you are copying a tarpaulin size or need to fit a specific wall or frame. Use the quick-size chips for the common tarpaulin sizes. The tool works out how many sheets that takes on your paper.

Not sure? See the tarpapel sizes guide for a table of sheet counts for every common size.

Step 4 — Crop and Check Sharpness

A crop box appears over your photo in the shape of the poster. Drag it to choose what gets printed; the sheet-layout preview on the right shows exactly where each page will fall, so you can keep faces away from the joins. If you would rather keep the whole photo, switch to Fit whole photo and the tool adds white borders instead.

Watch the sharpness badge. Green (110 DPI or more) looks crisp even up close. Amber (55–110 DPI) is fine from a metre away, which is how banners are viewed anyway — print shops run big tarpaulins in that range. Red means the photo is too small for that size — use a larger original, make the poster smaller, or choose a design with bold shapes and text, which enlarge far better than fine detail.

Step 5 — Create and Print the PDF

Click Create tarpapel PDF, then Download. You get one PDF with an assembly guide on page 1 and one sheet per page after that. Open it in any PDF viewer and print with these settings:

• Scale: 100% / Actual size. This is the one setting that matters. "Fit to page" or "Shrink to printable area" makes every sheet slightly smaller and the edges will not meet.
• Paper size in the print dialog = the size you chose in the tool.
• Pages: 2 to the end. Page 1 is the guide; print it too if you want the map on paper.
• Borderless printing is not required — the layout already keeps an 8 mm margin your printer can handle.

Printing from a phone works: use AirPrint, Mopria, or your printer's own app and look for a scale or "actual size" option. If the phone app does not offer one, send the PDF to a computer or a print shop and ask for 100% scale.

Step 6 — Cut, Overlap, Tape

1. Lay the sheets out by number — sheet 1 is top-left, numbers run across and then down, and each sheet also says its row and column.
2. Cut off the white margin on the right and bottom edges of every sheet along the small corner marks. Leave the left and top margins alone; they slide under the neighbouring sheet.
3. Starting at the top-left, lay each sheet over the one to its right and the one below so the trimmed edge sits exactly on the dashed guide line printed on the neighbour. That line marks the 10 mm overlap strip, which is the same image on both sheets, so there is no gap and no doubled line.
4. Tape on the back, or run a glue stick along the overlap before pressing down.
5. Optional: trim the outside edge, mount on an illustration board, cardboard or a sheet of plastic, and it is ready to hang.

Tips for a Better Tarpapel

• Design for distance. Big text, strong contrast, simple backgrounds. What reads at arm's length on your phone will read across a room on paper.
• Use 150 DPI (the default). It is sharp for paper banners and keeps the PDF small. Go to 200–300 only for small posters viewed up close.
• Mind your ink. Solid dark backgrounds use a lot; a light background with dark text looks cleaner and costs a fraction.
• Protect it. Clear packaging tape over the whole front, or a laminating sheet per page, makes an outdoor-ish tarpapel survive a day.
• Need a real tarpaulin later? The same design file works — just send the original image to the print shop, not the tiled PDF.

That is the whole process: upload, pick paper and size, crop, print at 100%, cut and tape. The Tarpapel Maker does the maths, adds the marks and the guide, and never sees your photo.