Print an A0 sewing pattern on A4 or Letter paper

What A0 and copy-shop sizes are

Each A size is half the one before it, so an A0 sheet holds 16 A4 sheets by area and A0 shrunk to A4 is exactly a quarter of its width and height. That's fine for seeing the layout and useless for cutting.

How many pages it takes

Your printer can't print to the edge, so each page shows a little less than a full sheet. The counts below use a 10 mm (⅜ in) margin on every side and are worked out the same way the tool tiles. Pages that end up empty after you remove the other sizes can be left out, so the real number is often lower.

Columns × rows, in whichever page orientation needs fewer pages. Letter counts use a ⅜ in margin.

Overlap or butt the edges?

• No overlap uses the fewest pages. Trim every page on its line and butt the edges together. It needs accurate cutting; a millimetre off on each join adds up across five pages.
• Overlap (10 mm or ½ in) prints a strip on both neighbouring pages. Trim only the top and left edge of each page and lay it over the one before, matching the pattern lines in the strip. It's more forgiving, and on A0 it rarely costs an extra page.

Tiling with Print only your size

1. Open the copy-shop PDF in the tool and choose your size from its layers. Tiling uses the same choice, so other sizes don't print.
2. Under What to make, choose Tile for home printer, then the paper, overlap and printer margin. The preview draws the page grid on the sheet and greys out pages that would be empty.
3. Download the tiled PDF (Pro, $9 once). Page 1 is an assembly map of the sheet with the page grid, plus a 1 in and a 5 cm square.
4. Print page 1 at 100% and measure the squares. Then print the rest with the same settings.
5. Each page has a label such as B3 in the top margin, the labels of its neighbours on each side, a trim line and, with overlap, red tick marks where the next page's cut edge goes. Rows run A, B, C from the top and columns 1, 2, 3 from the left.

Every page is exactly A4 or Letter. For ordinary PDFs the drawing is copied as lines, not as a picture, so it stays sharp and true to size; password-locked files are tiled from 200 dpi page images.

Free alternative: Acrobat Reader's Poster printing

On a Windows PC or Mac, Adobe Acrobat Reader can tile a large page while it prints. In the print dialog choose Poster under Page Sizing & Handling, keep Tile Scale at 100%, and set Overlap, Cut marks and Labels. Hide the sizes you don't need in the Layers panel first. Acrobat labels pages with the file name and a number rather than rows and columns, and the tiling happens at print time, so you need Acrobat on a computer each time you print.

Or send the A0 file to a copy shop

A print shop with a wide-format printer can print the A0 or 36 × 48 in file as one sheet, which saves the taping. Ask for it at 100% scale on plain paper. If the file is layered, make a single-size copy first so the shop prints only your size, because their print software may show every layer.