Making a Corel Template for Tile Murals

This is descended from the post of ARTGLASS crediting Tropical Graphics, crediting the original to Imprints, USA. Thank you all for this solid foundation to start from. It works in Corel 7 and 9. I have not tried it in any other version.

To make a template for tiles WITH overlapping edges to aid in alignment when subbing, use this procedure. Modify if you need loss of image for tiles with spacers.

Be sure that your image can be made to .2 inches larger than the final picture. (You will lose .1 inch from each edge.)

1) Open a new file in the normal size that you use.

2) With the box tool draw a box. Resize it to .2 inches longer and .2 inches higher than your tile to provide a .1 inch overlap on each edge.

3) Using the 'select' tool, click outside of the page. Set the duplicate X value to the horizontal size of the tile plus .1 inch and the duplicate Y value to 0.00.

4) Using 'ctrl+d' duplicate the number of tiles that you will use across.

5) Click outside of the page again. Set the duplicate X value to 0.00 and the duplicate Y value to the size of the tile plus .1 inch, remembering to make it a negative value. Now select all of the boxes and duplicate with 'ctrl+d' the number of tiles you will use downward.

6) Select all of the boxes and click on 'combine', Not group.

This gives you the template. Follow the instructions found at the Tropical Graphics website from here. When you separate the boxes there will be a duplicate edge on each tile containing a piece of the next tile image to help in aligning the image without losing the edge piece of image between tiles.

The Corel 7 print preview works a little differently than The Tropical Graphics instructions. To solve this problem put as many tiles on the page that will fit, then move toe others outside the borders of the page. Click 'layout' and 'insert pages' to add pages. When you go to the next page, anything outside of the original page will still show. Move what you need onto the page. You will now have a multi-page document that can be printed easily in a group or as single pages.

Thank you so much Dave & Lynn of Art Glass, Tropical Graphics, and Steve at Imprints, USA.