Repeat one design across a sheet

How do you print the same thing several times on one page?

Drop in the design, say how many across and how many down, and press Save PDF. You get one A4 sheet with the design repeated in a grid, filling the paper completely. Print as many copies of that sheet as you need children.

The alternative most of us have used is a table in Word with the picture pasted into each cell, which takes ten minutes, drifts out of alignment, and leaves a two-centimetre margin of wasted paper all the way round.

How big will each one come out?

A4 is 21 by 29.7 centimetres and the grid divides it exactly, because there are no margins. So two across and four down gives eight at 10.5 by 7.4 centimetres — near enough a bookmark. The tool prints the measurement as you change the numbers.

Grid	Each one	Per sheet
1 across, 3 down	21 × 9.9 cm	3 — wide strips, good for sentence cards
2 across, 4 down	10.5 × 7.4 cm	8 — name cards, bookmarks, table labels
3 across, 5 down	7 × 5.9 cm	15 — stickers, tokens, small prompt cards
4 across, 6 down	5.3 × 5 cm	24 — about as small as anything with words on it should go

Why is there no border?

Because the border is the thing this tool exists to get rid of. Every other route to a sheet of repeated designs leaves an unused margin down each side and a gutter between the copies, and on a class set that adds up to a lot of paper and a lot of trimming.

One thing to know: most printers cannot physically print to the very edge of the paper, so the outermost few millimetres may still come out white unless your printer offers a borderless setting. The design itself is laid out edge to edge either way, so nothing is cut off — you simply may have a thin white rim to trim.

Should the cut lines be on or off?

On, unless the lines would be visible on the finished item. They are thin, they run the full height and width of the sheet, and they make a guillotine job take a quarter of the time because you can line up on a line rather than on a guess.

Turn them off when the design has its own border or a coloured background, where a stray hairline would look like a mistake rather than a guide.

Can you put several different things on one sheet?

Yes — switch to the pages I pick and click the pages you want. They are packed onto the sheet in the order you clicked them, the layout is chosen from how many you picked, and the cut lines fall between them. This is the mode for a set of six different name cards, or four different prompt cards, rather than thirty copies of one.

The difference from repeating is what happens to the shape. A repeated design is stretched to fill its cell, because you drew it for that job. A packed page is fitted and centred, because it came from a document and distorting it would look wrong. Both cut on the same lines.

What do teachers use it for?

Name labels for trays and books, bookmarks for a reading focus, table cards, reward tokens, cut-out shapes for a maths lesson, vocabulary cards, and the little slips that go home in book bags. Anything where every child needs the identical thing and you would otherwise be printing thirty pages to get thirty small items.

Tiling, or several pages on one sheet?

They look similar and they are not the same job. Tiling repeats ONE design, so every copy is identical — that is what you want for a class set of the same card. Multi-up puts DIFFERENT pages together, so a twelve-page document lands on three sheets — that is what you want for a handout. If you are cutting the paper up afterwards you want this tool; if you are handing the whole sheet to a child you want that one.