aebrown wrote:I would note that there is nothing special about pdf995 in this regard. You can do the same thing with CutePDF or PDFCreator, or I would guess just about any PDF printer. As far as I know, they all have a way to set a custom paper size. I just did it with CutePDF (which is the standard PDF printer driver for clerk computers) and it worked just fine.
I agree. CutePDF and pdf995 work substantially the same. I have used both to produce very large map PDFs originated in different application software, although I only have CutePDF installed now.
The problems sharicarnahan and I described above involve the features and behavior of the Printer Friendly mode of the maps.lds.org application when trying to print maps of our geographically large wards. The method dennisn describes is essentially what we have been trying, but it does not work for our units. Apparently it may work well for smaller, compact wards, but ours are larger than the threshhold of usability of this website function. The dynamic clusters don't expand to show the family names, and the missing navigation controls make it next to impossible to zoom and frame the map properly for printing at all.
However, I am able to print large CutePDF maps of my ward originated from other mapping applications. I find that the relatively inexpensive DeLorme Street Atlas USA application meets that need. I use it with CutePDF to print my ward with all family names as a 36 X 48 inch map at a scale of 1:20,800. That is equivalent to 1 inch to 1,733 feet.
At some point, when the units become even larger, it becomes inherently impossible for any map application to display enough street map detail and still show the whole area at once. For another ward, several times larger than mine, I have resorted to creating two large PDFs from the DeLorme application: One map zoomed out to show the whole ward as a 90 X 40 inch PDF at a scale of 1:31,250; and a zoomed-in, 36 X 60 inch map at a scale of 1:17,600 covering only the urban portion. Those maps did not include the family names because the user's requirements were different, but they did need to see street detail.