Re: Page Breaks - what are they for?

[Michael Ross <michael e ross gmail com>]

Here are some excerpts from earlier page break questions.  There is an archive of mail, but I never use it so I have no advise on getting to it.

Also, you can hide the breaks by making them the same as you background color.  If you never print your diagrams (I mostly use screen dumps) you can just ignore the scale of your Dia with respect to the page breaks.

M

......................

Jay,

The outline of a "Page" if you show the page breaks is the paper size minus the margins.  So a lettersize 8.5 x 11 with one inch margins will have page breaks that are 6.5 x 9 apart.  If you look at the cm rulers and convert to inches (2.54 cm = 1 in) you will see the correspondence.  Centimeters aside if you are a US customary unit user, the nice thing about this is you can work on the array of pages and know just how the printing will break out on multiple sheets, and you can change the view scale and put an entire diagram on one sheet without worrying about the margins - just stay within the page breaks.   You could say that this method of display absolves us of looking a a bunch non-printing, space wasting, white space between sheets. 

Here is a little walk through:  Set your zoom to 100%, and go to the File/Page Setup.  Set it to Letter size , Landscape, and Scale to 100%.  Set the top and left margins to 0.0in, set the bottom margin to 0.5in, and the right to 2.0in.  You will see the the cm rulers correspond to and 8in by 9 inch working area.  Tweak the Scale to see what that does.  If you leave the scale at 100% and change the zoom level you will see the rulers track the size of the page that was setup.  If you make the scale 200% you will see that this scales the diagram up to double size and the rulers agree with this.  50% makes the diagram half size.

.....................................

Paul,

I am with you - I haven't got a whole view of the units/grid/margins/pagesize, etc.  I do have a way of operating that suits my needs (and where I mostly know what I am doing).  I will try to explain it an maybe I will understand better and you will benefit.

The base units of Dia are cm.

My default set up is like this:

Page Setup:

Letter size, portrait

Units of inches, 

margins set to 1.000 inch all 4 sides

Scale 100%

Grid:
White Background, 

pale Grid Lines,

dark Page breaks

Grid Spacing 0.254

Grid Visible Spacing  1

Dynamic Grid    Off

Here is what I see:

Ruler is measuring in cm

The grid is showing inches, but you have to mentally convert the ruler (cm) to tell this is true.

0.254cm  = 0.1in

The grid lines are spaced just so, where each inch is 2.54 cm (check it on the ruler)

The the page displays the working area according to my 1 inch margins so that the page working area is 6.5in x x9in. ((8.5 - 1 - 1) x (11 - 1 - 1)).  The ruler shows this to be the distance between page breaks shown in cm.  

In Preferences/Grid the "lines per major line" is set to 10.

The bolder grid lines make it easy to see where the inches are even though the ruler is cm.  The page breaks mark out the real extents of a page in inches.  Look at one of the pages near the ruler origin (0,0) to see ruler numbers that make sense.

If you change the margins they will correctly shift  - smaller margins get you a larger working area in inches; larger margins means smaller working area.

I use this setup as my default, and sometimes have to go back to it for reassurance.  Everything makes sense this way so when I change things I can refer back to this as a frame of reference.

Good luck,

M

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 7:08 AM, Chris G <cl isbd net> wrote:

I'm confused (no change there then!) about what the 'Page Break'
markings do for me.

It took me a while to realise that the solid blue lines *were* the Page
Breaks and that I could remove them using the Preferences settings.
That's good as I find them distracting because they sit very close
to some of the major grid lines on my system.

However I also don't understand what they're for, they don't appear to
indicate actual paper size blocks on the diagram, on my system they seem
to be just over 15cm wide (hence the blue line is very close to the 15cm
grid line) and 24cm high.  The default paper size on my system is A4 so
those dimensions are nothing like the paper size.


Playing a bit further I'm now also confused by the Dynamic grid setting
and the general usage of the rulers and grid lines.  When I set a
diagram to Dynamic grid and zoom in and out the grid lines change
sometimes but not other times, does it just do its best to keep the grid
lines at about the same size?


Final question - is it possible to reset the top left corner of a
diagram to 0:0 on the rulers?

--
Chris Green
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-- 
                    Michael E. Ross
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