jimmykl
commented
1 year ago Cool idea!
An couple of handy features for tiling multiple pages (which I use all the time in Illustrator) would be the ability to add an overlap and trim marks on the tiles.
The overlap, basically a negative margin on each tile, gives you some leeway when trimming the tiles because part of each neighbouring tile is included. This should reduce the impact of pen visible up/down 'dots' because you'd be cutting in the middle of a drawn line rather than where the line finishes on the edge of the tile.
And trim marks make it easy to line up a ruler to cut off the overlapped area.
Tiles I'd like to suggest an additional unit of plotting, to add to the drawing/pen/pen-group. The hierarchy would look something like…
Why? Not everyone has an A0 (or greater!) sized plotter. By adding the creation and exporting/plotting of tiles, those of us with smaller plotters can easily produce much larger plots. With an A4 plotter, DBv3 and a tiling option, it would be straightforward to produce A0 and beyond sized posters.
I think most of the critical internal functions are in place to enable this (ie the clipping and masking options etc). The interface needn't be too exotic, pretty much the same as you've already got for Mosaic Rectangles. When exporting, the exported files would follow the naming hierarchy of the diagram. With that in place, you could have a virtually seamless large-format plotting option (the default being 1 'tile' for the entire document), or if you wanted to, use the tiling on top of the Mosaic Rectangles to have multiple 'self-contained' plots that would then be arranged in a more stylised fashion.