create image file of a country

Consider shrinking down your filesize by removing tags that won't appear at the scale you print ;

• buildings
• address numbers (addr* tags)
• shops
• tracks
• • ...

OSMFILTER.EXE is a small program but does an excellent job.

OSMFILTER -h to get the help

To render 4GB with maperitive on you desktop will take some time. My last map sources were 44 MB and took eight seconds to render.

The possibilities you have imho:

• Strip the file down to relevant data (big highways, boundaries, cities, woods etc) using OSMfilter and try to render the result with maperitive.
• Go to http://maposmatic.org, create a map of Belgium, download the SVG and edit it to your liking
• Use http://overpass-turbo.eu/ with a self defined css, make the browser window a little bigger and export the image as png. My result you can see/download here (32MB).
• Nearly the same as above: Bigmap
• Use the share-button at osm.org and select the format you want. Problem: I tried it for Belgium and got the two times I tried it a gateway timeout.

hth
Thomas