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4.2 Printing

MetaEdit+ allows printing of system designs through the Graph | Print... command in the Diagram Editor, Matrix Editor, and Table Editor, and File | Print... in the Report Output tool.

When you print you are first asked for the printer. If you are printing from one of the editors you are then asked for the scale of the printout or how many pages you want to print over (see Figure 4-13). By default, printing is of the whole used area of the graph, scaled to fit on a single page.

Figure 4-13. Print settings dialog.

You can choose to print at a different scale or over a certain number of pages in two different ways. Changing the print settings with the Scale field or Default button will make the printout have exactly that scale, and the printout will automatically take more pages if necessary but does not try to fill the whole of every page.

Changing the settings with the sliders of Pages wide / tall fields will make the printout fill the whole of every page in one dimension. The resulting scale factor is shown in the Scale field. Note that the number of pages you specify may not all be used, since the printout is always scaled uniformly in the x and y directions.

You may also print only the visible area of the editor window by clicking this option in the Print Settings dialog. If you apply this option, please scale and zoom the editor window before printing.

When you press OK in the print scale dialog the output is sent to the printer. You may also use a print preview tool by pressing Preview button. The preview tool shows the output a page at a time. Pressing the Print button actually sends the output to the printer and closing the window cancels printing.

Host printing and PostScript printing

MetaEdit+ supports two types of printing: host printing (only for Windows platforms) and built-in PostScript printing (primarily for Unix platforms: in Windows you can use Windows’ own host printer drivers for PostScript printing). In platforms that support host printing MetaEdit+ automatically opens your operating system’s standard printing dialog: if you want to use MetaEdit+’s built-in PostScript driver instead, hold down shift when you select the Print... menu item. If host printing fails for some reason, MetaEdit+ will try again, using its built-in PostScript driver.

The built-in PostScript driver includes its own printing tool which offers you the basic functionality to choose the layout and printer drivers for your printouts.

Figure 4-14. Printing tool.

The printing tool is illustrated in Figure 4-14 as it opens after choosing the print command on non-Windows platforms, or with shift held down. The Printer: field at the top left shows the name of the current printer definition, either one of MetaEdit+’s built-in printers or a host printer name from Windows. The Area settings allow printing only a subset of the total number of pages, useful when printing from a Report Output Tool. The Windows Printer... button selection allows Windows users to choose to print via a Windows host printer driver: this may be useful if you want to change the default MetaEdit+ page layout settings. The Printer... button allows you to choose one of MetaEdit+’s built-in printer drivers, as in Figure 4-15. The Document Layout... opens a dialog for editing the margins and other page layout settings: see below in Section 4.2.1.

Figure 4-15. Printer selection dialog.

The printers available here are:
default: portrait printing to a PostScript file
default landscape: landscape printing to a PostScript file
host: portrait printing to the Windows default printer. Other than the setting to portrait, this uses the current default settings in Windows.
host landscape: landscape printing to the Windows default printer. Other than the setting to portrait, this uses the current default settings in Windows.
report: initially has the same settings as host. The print...filename command in the report language prints diagrams using this printer type.

These initial settings can be changed; changes will only have effect within the current MetaEdit+ session.

Printer options

To choose a printer, double-click it in the list, or select it and press the Use Selected As Default button. To change the settings for a printer, select it in the list and press the Options... button. This will open a Printer Options dialog, as in Figure 4-16.

Figure 4-16. Printer options dialog.

‘Format’ allows you to select the paper size (from A2 to A5)
‘Type’ is for choosing the type of printer driver (host or generic PostScript: you will not normally need to work with host printers here).
‘Orientation’ allows you to choose whether the printing is in portrait or landscape mode.
‘Unix Printscript’ is mainly only applicable to PostScript printing on Unix platforms, and specifies the printer command to be used: $file should be used to represent the PostScript file name which will be written by MetaEdit+ when you print (normally print.tmp). In Windows, if the Unix Printscript contains any text at all, the print.tmp file will be sent to the default Windows printer.
‘Unit’ allows you to choose which measurement unit is used for the Top Left Inset settings.
‘Top Left Inset’ can be used to define the top left point for your printer: the first point on the page at which the printer is capable of printing. You may need to set this if you find that printouts are not aligned properly on the page, or the extreme edges of the header or footer are missing.

4.2.1 Page Layout

MetaEdit+ uses the same page layout settings for all printers. The settings can be changed in the Page Layout dialog, as in Figure 4-17.

Figure 4-17. Page layout dialog.

‘Page Style’ chooses whether all pages have the same margins, or whether the margins should be set differently for even numbered pages (left-hand page of a two page spread) and odd pages. The first page printed is always number 1, so odd. The settings for ‘Odd Side’ are only available if you choose Two Sides here.

The other settings are illustrated in Figure 4-18. The header and footer are used for text generated automatically by MetaEdit+, including the graph name, date and page number.

Figure 4-18. Page layout settings.


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