I have three deadlines at the moment, so of course I needed to take a couple of hours to tackle a project that has been on my to-do list for seven+ years: figuring out how to print the world’s greatest webpage at full-scale.
I hadn’t figured out how to print the Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide in the time between it first going viral and when its wonky html code finally got fixed a few years later. I bought myself some more time by publishing the original page on my site as a work, Untitled (embroidery trouble shooting guide), one of my collection of zombie art websites.
But I have always wanted to see it printed out. A book never turned out right, and the exponentially growing font size made a joke of any remotely normal printing process, even to look at it.
Today though, I decided to just print the webpage as a pdf, and see how big one sheet needed to be to hold it all. And it worked. From that, I figured out how big the font on the last line of text actually is. [I mentioned this triumph at dinner, and my wife just said, “Can’t you just calculate it from the code?” Reader, I married her.]
Anyway, the answer is a single page 175 feet tall and 330 feet wide, slightly larger than a football field. Rendered in 6,093 point font, the last, largest line of text is almost 85 inches tall.
Surely, there is a 96-inch wide, 500-foot long roll of paper waiting to take this work. I do know a guy with an Epson printer; maybe I should just print it on primed Belgian linen folded in half instead.
Previously: Untitled (Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide), 2013
also: ⌘S