Tarpapel Maker

Tarpapel ("tarpaulin" + "papel", the Filipino word for paper) is a poster or banner made by printing a large design across several sheets of ordinary bond paper and joining them, instead of paying a print shop for a tarpaulin. Elsewhere it is called a block poster, a tiled poster, or "rasterbating". It is popular for birthdays, school projects, classroom décor, campaign signage and small events.

Use this page. Upload your photo, pick your paper size and how many sheets (or the exact finished size), adjust the crop, and download the PDF. It works in any modern browser on Android, iPhone, Windows and Mac, and nothing is installed or uploaded — the PDF is generated on your device.

Use whatever your printer already has loaded. In the Philippines that is usually Long bond paper (8.5 × 13 in) or Short (Letter, 8.5 × 11 in); A4 is standard almost everywhere else. Long gives you a slightly bigger poster per sheet. Whatever you pick here, choose the same size in the print dialog.

With the default 8 mm margin and 10 mm overlap: on A4 portrait, 5 sheets across × 5 down (25 sheets); on Long bond paper, 5 across × 4 down (20 sheets); on Letter/Short, 5 across × 5 down (25 sheets). Switch to "Exact size", type 3 × 4 ft, and the tool shows the count for your paper instantly. Landscape orientation sometimes needs fewer sheets — try both.

Each sheet is laid out at real-world scale so the overlap strips and cut marks line up. If the printer driver shrinks pages to "fit", every sheet becomes a few millimetres smaller and the edges will not meet. In the print dialog choose 100%, "Actual size", or set scaling to "None", and make sure the paper size matches the one you chose here.

Cut off the white margin on the right and bottom of each sheet along the corner marks. Starting from the top-left sheet, lay each sheet over its right-hand and lower neighbours so the trimmed edge sits on the dashed guide line, then tape on the back or glue the overlap strip. Page 1 of your PDF has a numbered map of the sheets.

The sharpness badge tells you before you print: green (110+ DPI) is crisp even up close, amber (55–110 DPI) looks fine from a metre away — which is how banners are seen, and the range print shops use for tarpaulins — and red means it will look blocky. To improve it use a bigger original photo, reduce the poster size, or pick a design with large simple shapes and text, which survive enlargement better than detailed photos.

Yes. Design the banner in any app (Canva, PowerPoint, Photoshop, or even a phone photo editor), export it as a large JPG or PNG, then upload it here to split it into sheets. Exporting at the highest resolution available keeps the text sharp.

It is completely free with no sign-up, watermark or limits, and your photo is never uploaded: the splitting, the PDF and the preview all run inside your browser, so it also works on slow connections.