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General question about printing and export to PDF (Read 15571 times)

Rennie Full Member Offline I Love MindFusion! Posts: 108 Location: Copenhagen, Denmark Joined: Jul 17^th, 2012	General question about printing and export to PDF May 6^th, 2013 at 2:37pm	Print Post
	I'm trying to add support to let the user print the diagram or export it to PDF. My first efforts aren't very successful - please see attachments. The two nodes in the print preview are the two tiny points in the upper left corner. My program uses MeasureUnit = pixel. I've seen here on the forum that there are lots of problems with that and printing. So I guess my question is, what is the best and easiest way to make the program provide printing and export to PDF support? Change the program to not use MeasureUnit = pixel, and overcome the problems that entails, or get into various workarounds involving copying the diagram to a new hidden view and do printing and export to PDF from there? Thanks. PS. Maximum attachment size of 250 KB? Do you store them on floppy disks?

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Stoyo God Member Offline MindFusion support Posts: 13230 Joined: Jul 20^th, 2005	Re: General question about printing and export to PDF Reply #1 - May 7^th, 2013 at 6:15am	Print Post
	Hi, Diagram.MeasureUnit is a simple wrapper around Graphics.PageUnit, and setting it to Pixel makes diagram coordinates correspond to device physical pixels. Since printers' DPI count is much larger than screen's, you will have to scale by the printer's DPI / screen's DPI to get the same size on paper. You can scale the print output by setting PrintOptions.Scale. Use printer's DefaultPageSettings.PrinterResolution.X value to find the DPI of a printer. Alternatively, switch MeasureUnit temporarily to Point, and possibly scale by 72 / 96 to get closer to screen resolution. I hope that helps, Stoyan


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Rennie Full Member Offline I Love MindFusion! Posts: 108 Location: Copenhagen, Denmark Joined: Jul 17^th, 2012	Re: General question about printing and export to PDF Reply #2 - May 7^th, 2013 at 10:15am	Print Post
	Hi Stoyan, and thanks. In trying to get something to work I've temporarily suppressed the background image, so I only have the two (custom) nodes. If I call PrintOptions.ScaleToPage() then PrintOptions gets set to 680! What does that mean? (I'm still using Diagram.MeasureUnit = pixel.) But PrintOptions.Scale = 680 actually works - the two nodes are printed about where I would expect them to be. See attachment. But the texts are not printed. These are custom nodes similar to those in the IconNodes sample program. What do I need to do to get the texts printed? And one last question - it looks like the scaling has been done based on the printing being done in landscape orientation, but the preview doesn't automatically switch to landscape orientation. Is there a way of specifying which page orientation you want? Thanks.

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Stoyo God Member Offline MindFusion support Posts: 13230 Joined: Jul 20^th, 2005	Re: General question about printing and export to PDF Reply #3 - May 7^th, 2013 at 1:58pm	Print Post
	Hi, ScaleToPage applies the largest possible scale that still fits the diagram within a single page. I don't think scaling is done for landscape, however the print operation always preserves the diagram origin (it assumes the user would want to see the leftmost nodes printed at same offset it had on screen, especially if there is a BackgroundImage set). So in your sample the content rectangle that is scaled to fit the page includes the diagram origin and two nodes, and it look correctly scaled for a portrait page. It should be enough to call DrawString from the node.Draw override to print texts. If the strings do not appear, try using a different font.Unit. I remember there were problems drawing scaled texts with some font units, not sure which ones exactly... I hope that helps, Stoyan


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Rennie Full Member Offline I Love MindFusion! Posts: 108 Location: Copenhagen, Denmark Joined: Jul 17^th, 2012	Re: General question about printing and export to PDF Reply #4 - May 8^th, 2013 at 5:22am	Print Post
	Thanks for your help. The thing that threw me about the "scale factor" of 680 was that it was so large. The printer does not have 680 times as many pixels per inch as the screen! Then I discovered that the so-called "scale factor" is actually a percentage. You were right about Font.Unit being the problem with the text. The default unit of Point does not work, but Pixel does.


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Rennie Full Member Offline I Love MindFusion! Posts: 108 Location: Copenhagen, Denmark Joined: Jul 17^th, 2012	Re: General question about printing and export to PDF Reply #5 - May 8^th, 2013 at 10:36am	Print Post
	OK, I got it working (I think). See attachment. One more question, if I may: Do you have any suggestion as to how I can add some space between the header line and the diagram? Thanks.

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Stoyo God Member Offline MindFusion support Posts: 13230 Joined: Jul 20^th, 2005	Re: General question about printing and export to PDF Reply #6 - May 9^th, 2013 at 5:59am	Print Post
	The header string is always printed immediately above the top margin at this time. The only way I can think of to add more space is by appending new lines to the header: Code var nl = Environment.NewLine; diagramView.PrintOptions.HeaderFormat = "%D , Page %P" + nl + nl; I hope that helps, Stoyan


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Rennie Full Member Offline I Love MindFusion! Posts: 108 Location: Copenhagen, Denmark Joined: Jul 17^th, 2012	Re: General question about printing and export to PDF Reply #7 - May 13^th, 2013 at 10:01am	Print Post
	OK, thanks, that actually works.


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