Printing Tiles at correct Size

[JaguarPaw1983]

Hi guys,

I was wondering if anyone who has printed and used tiles for HQ successfully could help me?

This is my first attempt at printing and using tiles for a board game so I think I may have done something wrong.

I am intending to use the tiles on the new 2021 board which has 1inch x 1inch tiles.

I have gathered some tiles from various sources and used to gimp to arrange them on a A4 page. In Gimp, using the measuring tool, I can see that the individual squares measure 1x1 inches and the sizing for everything is correct.

I went to a print shop to get them printed and everything is smaller. Somehow the image has been scaled. It's not by a huge amount. One tile that is supposed to be 8 inches long measures 7 3/4 inches. Unfortunately, it's enough that it will rubbish on the board, I'm sure. Each 1x1 inch square is slightly under 1 inch so I'm certain that it is an issue with scaling of the entire page.

I used PNG format for printing. Not sure if this is a factor. The print resolution is set to 300 dpi and they said that the printer could manage that.

Gimp is very similar to Photoshop as well, so if someone has had a problem with this before it may be relevant.

Has anyone encountered this before? What was you fix?

[Kurgan]

When you set to print make sure it's print as full size (100%) rather than scaling. If you need to select a bigger paper size, do that. I ask the technician to help me. I will sometimes even take the image on my computer screen at 100% size and hold the official tile right up touching the image on my monitor to make sure it looks right. If the tiles are slightly smaller than the other tiles, no big deal, only if they're way off like you say that they feel off when trying to play. I have no problem at all using classic size tiles on a remake size board though. I'm not going to reprint EVERYTHING just so it "matches."

[JaguarPaw1983]

Thanks for the reply.

I might try again tomorrow and I can check what the guy is doing on the print setup screen, I didn't notice him select anything with regard to scaling.

Having looked at it, I'm pretty sure that the difference in size is due to margins. I don't know what options he had selected, but I have just read that enforced margins on a print can result in a loss of scale of about 3%.

In my example above of 8 inches becoming 7 3/4 inches that would seem to bear out, as 3% of 8 inches is about a quarter of an inch.

The suggested fix, is to crop the paper size down in the image editor when creating the image. Not quite sure how this helps. Perhaps the margins aren't enforced if the image stays within certain bounds?

Wouldn't have thought it was this difficult to get something to print to scale.

It's a fairly small difference I suppose, but they are a surprise for my dad when we do Return of the Witchlord at Christmas so I wanted them to be bang on. It probably won't show too much on the smaller tiles.