On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 03:50:30PM -0500, Christopher Conroy wrote: > Hey guys. This is a bit of an off the wall question, and my google-fu hasn't > really produced any answers to my liking. > > I would like to be able to calculate what size of an image to produce in > order to print to a target size. Specifically, I'm going to be working on > some CAD like stuff which requires a fair amount of computation. Thus, I > need to do all the computational geometry outside of any program that > supports such a feature (e.g. AutoCAD). I haven't started coding any of > this, though I will probably use Ruby or Java if that makes a difference. > Either way, I'll be creating images from the calculations. > > So, really this is just a matter of figuring out the best way to map image > resolution in pixels to print dimensions in inches. > > Anyone know of an easy way to do this aside from trial and error testing? > I'd like to be as exact as possible, and ideally not have to do any image > scaling at print time. (Ideally, the solution will work across multiple > printers. Bonus points for anything OS agnostic.)
Sounds like you need to know the dots per inch (DPI) of what your printing technique is. A lot of printers use 300 DPI, so if you want a 12" image, use 12*300 == 3600 pixels. Maybe you're asking something more complicated and I'm not understanding, but... - Rob .
