Re: How to set up to create a diagram to print on one sheet?

[Chris Green <cl isbd net>]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 02:29:27PM -0400, Michael Ross wrote:
>    Chris,
>    The Dia paradigm is a little different.  You draw up what ever you like
>    then you size the page however you want around it.  

That's all very well, but see below about scaling.


>    My drill is like this:
>    You may need to make the page break lines a contrasting color to your
>    background (in the Preferences/View Defaults/Page Breaks menu).
>     preferences persist from session to session so mine are always how I like
>    them.  Background color is under Diagram Defaults, and grid line color is
>    under Grid Lines.
Er, but this rather conflicts with the first sentence doesn't it?
Seeing the page breaks means that you *are* creating a diagram on a
page, or at least with an awareness of the page breaks.


>    I set the Page Set Up to Letter, Landscape, all margins 0.5in top, bottom,
>    left & right,. and a Scale of around 35% (depending on the monitor I am
>    using).  This gives me a page about the size and shape of my screen.

OK, this makes reasonable sense.  I've never understood why default
margins (on every program I have ever come across) are always so huge. 

>    Whatever I draw inside those lines will print on one page.

OK, but as noted below, the symbol libraries are then pretty useless
as the symbols are way too big.


>    Another approach is to turn off the page breaks by giving then the same
>    color as you background, and just draw whatever you like, and when
>    completed set the page breaks to contrats again, pick paper size and scale
>    so it all fits - all after the fact.

All OK, except that the symbols I want to use don't scale sensibly,
try some of the diode symbols, when you scale them they just become
blobs.


What I have done previously is to do what you say and then import the
diagram into a web page and scale it there (after conversion to Jpeg
or whatever), that works fine but I really wanted to create 'pages' of
diagrams this time.


>    Some notes on margins that a lot of people assume differently.
>    What is displayed on screen is the printed area of the diagram.  If you
>    have one inch margins set all around, then the printed page will have a
>    1in margin around.  For example an 8.5 x 11 letter page would have a
>    printed area of 6.5 x 9. Set margins to 0.5in and the printed area will
>    expand out to 7.5 x 10.

Which is not very useful if trying to print multi-page diagrams and
stick them together!  :-)

-- 
Chris Green