HOWTO: Generate Contact Paper

This howto describes how you can build a script that generates a contact paper, a page containing multiple miniature photographs (originally created by exposing a photographic paper with dia negatives lying on top).

The example code shown here is using the bash interpreter.

  1. Download and install ImageMagick, if you have not done this already. ImageMagick is a set of tools that are very practical when working a lot with images.
  2. Select you favourite page size. I selected A4, since this is the standard page format.
  3. Select you target resolution for the part images and for the full page. I selected an image size of 200 pixels.
  4. Calulate how many photographs that should fit into your selected paper with the selected resolution. For me six photographs fit in width and eight in height.

  5. The first part of the script use montage to create the pages:

    Now you have a script that generages images that contain the contact papers. If you want to put them in a PDF for printing, then continue.

  6. The second part of the script uses convert to put together the images into a Portable Document (PDF):