Adobe Illustrator to tiled A4 and US Letter

What print-at-home tiles need

• ✓Pages laid out separately for A4 and for US Letter, since neither fits the other
• ✓An overlap between pages, with alignment marks on the shared edges
• ✓A tile ID on every page and an assembly map on page 1
• ✓The test square on page 1, and print scaling switched off
• ✓Every size on its own layer, so sewists print only theirs

By hand, tiling in Illustrator means an artboard per page (separately for A4 and Letter) and moving every piece into place, or printing with tiling to a PDF printer, which flattens your layers.

The Sewpress way, from Adobe Illustrator

1. 1
   Set up your layers

   Make one top-level layer per size in the Layers panel (S, M, L), and shared layers whose names start with an underscore (_grainlines, _notches, _test). Sublayers and groups inside a layer are fine.

2. 2
   Export for Sewpress

   Save as Adobe PDF with “Create Acrobat Layers from Top-Level Layers” ticked. A PDF carries real units, so scale is never in doubt, and each top-level layer arrives as a PDF layer.

3. 3
   Upload and check

   Illustrator writes SVG at 72 units per inch, while browsers and Inkscape read 96, so an Illustrator SVG measures 75%. Saving a PDF avoids it; if you do upload an SVG, Sewpress spots the 75 mm square and rescales with one click.

4. 4
   Build print-at-home tiles

   Sewpress places your master once and builds tiled A4 and US Letter, measuring the test square in each.