I have a diagram I created that is rather large. I'm trying to figure out how to print it so that it will nicely print over multiple pages, how do I do this?
When I currently print the problem is the elements of the diagram print verrrry large. Like one button takes up an entire page which is a waste of ink.
What is the best practice (proper way) to set up the diagram in DIA to make printing proper and scale correctly to paper size and so forth etc.
I'm running the Mac Os X Version of DIA currently.
If you now how many pages wide and tall your diagram should be
Select File->Page Setup... from the menu
Select "Fit to"
Enter the number of pages
Are you aware that "page breaks" are always displayed in Dia (usually blue lines) That's an
easy way to check how your printed diagram will end up on the pages
If the simple approach with the number of pages does not fit your approach, you'll have to switch back from "Fit to" to "Scale" and work out the scale that you're looking for.
I ended up exporting it from dia as an svg and then resizing it in gimp when I wanted to print out my entire diagram, which stuffed up the text sizes for me, but I had changed the text from the default size so if you haven't changed the text from the default size it will probably still look ok.
In the end print screen and paint was what gave me the best results with dia, sad but true.
If you do find a better way of exporting files for printing please let me know.
Related
I have created some flowcharts in Dia (diaw.exe 0.97.2 - Windows 7 64 bit).
Now I want to export them to pdf.
This is working alright if I use File > Page Setup > Fit to...
Problem is, Diagrams with different sizes all get zoomed differently.
My perfect scale would be 41, but when I use that, I just get a bunch of empty pages when I export them to pdf.
What "works" is if I draw a rectangle around the whole page in dia and set the line color to white, so it is not displayed. Still, the pdfs contain 3 empty pages and on the 4th page is my flowchart.
I didnt find a dia-related forum, so I hope somebody here can help me out.
It "seems" to be just because of the Page setup...
Thanks a lot,
basti
Page setup is exactly why this happens. If you didn't make any changes to your dia setup, your grid consists of grey lines and blue lines. The blue lines mark borders of a page. If you want everything to fit on one page, you have to enlarge your page until everything fits into one page.
I faced the same issues when using pdf export in dia, and it is fixed by avoiding the pdf export, and to rather use a pdf printer instead.
I am looking for a way to measure the coordinates of different rectangles on a PDF file?
Mainly I do have to perform some overprinting on an existing PDF and I need to know the x,y,w,h on where I am supposed to write the texts.
It seems that Preview.app on Mac has this ability but so far I wasn't able to find anything on Windows that does the same.
Please do not confuse this feature with the Measuring Tools from Adobe Reader which are used to measure distance in printed construction stuff, not the PDF page itself.
It seems that the default using of measure is point, so I need something that would allow to select a rectangle and that will tell me the coordinates.
Please do not suggest on exporting as a imagine and using something else to measure the pixels on the image.
Update: http://legacy.activepdf.com/support/knowledgebase/view.cfm?tk=rl&kb=11866 -- PDF Units, that's what I am looking for, something to measure the PDF coordinates in PDF units.
Disclaimer: I work for Atalasoft.
I know you said not to suggest this, but honestly, it's the easiest approach:
If you mean "sweep out a rectangle in the UI and report the coordinates", that's pretty straight forward, but it's going to be a build-your-own type of thing. What you will need are:
A PDF rasterizer (GhostScript, Acrobat, FoxIt, Atalasoft) to get you an image at a specific resolution.
A tool to display that image in a window and let you sweep out a rectangle (this is straight forward winforms type code for .NET, but we have a control that does this out of the box - combining 1 & 2 into one step).
A tool that can look at the structure of a PDF page and report back the crop box (if any) and the media box for each page (iText, DotPdf).
A tool/understanding of matrix transformations to build the matrix that goes from display space into PDF space (and/or vice versa, probably in iText, definitely in DotPdf)
The code flow becomes something like:
For each page:
Open document, pull out crop and media box, rasterize page, build transformation matrix.
Display image, build/hook into event for selection changing.
Push the image viewer rectangle coordinates through the transformation matrix.
Profit.
From a coding point of view (assuming 0 prior knowledge of this, but a decent understanding of linear algebra), from 3 days to a 2 weeks. If I were to write it, it would probably take on the order of a few hours, but I wrote most of our PDF tools and this is pretty easy.
If your goal is to intuit where rectangles are on the page and report back those coordinates, that's also doable, but it decidedly non-trivial in comparison. You need to write code that can rip through a PDF display list and interpret the contents correctly. That means being able to handle all the cumulative matrix transformations, the graphics state changes, the gstate object use, Form XObject placement, and so on. You need to answer the question "what is a rectangle?" because in PDF placement, it could be an re operator, a set of degenerate beziers, a set of lines, an image of a rectangle or (surprise!) a combination of all of the above. Honestly, intuiting anything about the content on a PDF page is a Herculean task.
What I am ultimately trying to do is to create a grid of images for print that are minor variations of the same thing (different text is all). Looking through online resources I was able to create a script that changes the text and exports all of the images necessary (several hundred). What I am trying to do now is to import all of these images into a new photoshop document and lay them all out in a grid and I can't seem to find any examples of this.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to place a file at a specific coordinate (I'm using CS5 and have the design suite so if there is a way in illustrator to do this quickly...)?
Also, I'm open to other ideas on how to do this (even other programs) easily. It's for labels so the positioning on the sheet has to be pretty precise...
The art layer object has a translate() method that takes delta x and y params. You'll need to open each image, copy it to the target document, get its current location (using artLayer.bounds) and do the math to find the deltas to position it where you want it. Your deltas can be in pixels so you'll get plenty of precision.
Check out your 'JavaScript Scripting Reference' pdf in your Adobe install directory for more details.
Ok I'm marking Anna's response as the answer because though I didn't fully test it, it seems like it should work and answers the original question with jsx. However I'm also leaving my final solution in case anyone else runs across this with the same issue and may prefer this method as well.
What I ended up doing instead is using InDesign. I figured out that it has a grid option that lets you import a number of files and place them all in an equal grid in a single command. This is almost exactly what I was looking for, except that it leaves a small border/margin in between the columns and grids and mine were designed to meet exactly.
I couldn't figure out how to make it not have the border (I have very little experience with InDesign, it may be possible). However I was able to select all my images and scale them uniformly to be the correct size, then I just selected each column and dragged it over to snap to the adjacent column and the same with rows...
I'm writing some logic to build a large single PDF file that our users can print at their convenience. I'm using Java's iText library (through Clojure's clj-pdf).
I'm trying to have the PDF show the same exact template form on every single page, however I can't seem to find any documentation or indication that one can have PDF content "fit to a page".
The text in these forms varies a little bit, so there's a chance it might require more of fewer text lines per page. This means that the content has a chance of spilling over to the next page, or being too short, making the next page creep up into the previous one, breaking the requirement of "one form per page" for the rest of the document.
I'm trying to figure out if my option is pretty much only to manually check the length of the text on each page and potentially crop it by hand if I goes over n lines, or if the PDF format somehow supports a smart way of having paragraphs+tables+headings all fit in one page. Some UI systems allow you to control how spill-over is handled, anywhere from cropping to resizing the font, so I'm curious if PDF supports anything of that sort.
Edit: ended up going with pagebreaks for simplicity, wasn't aware of that option when I wrote this question.
If you want to take control over the space taken by text, for instance to fit it on a single page, the way to go would be to create a ColumnText object and to add the content in simulation mode. If the text fits the page, add it for real. If it doesn't, use a smaller font size. This is demonstrated in the MovieAds example where snippets of text are fitted into AcroForm fields.
I have a RDLC report and I am displaying it on the Report Viewer Control in my front end application. I get the report perfectly and theres no problem in it.
But the problem arises when I try to export the report to a PDF (using available option - basically the inbuilt option).
I get the report in 3 pages whereas my client wants it to be in a single page. I am not able to figure out the reason for it as in my report viewer I see only one page but in a PDF there are 3 pages. I have only four columns with no data, still they are breaking up into multiple pages. 2 columns on 1st page 2 on second page. Not real sure what happened to the 3rd page. Somebody recommended changing the paper size of the default printer but I didn't think is was worth trying.
Can something be done abt it so that I can control the size of the report???
This can be a real PITA but there are several things you can do to get you there in BIDS.
To see what it will look like as a pdf use the "Print Layout" button on the preview mode toolbar.
Goto the report properties and set the orientation and paper size as you need them.
Remember the margins in the report properties to make your report display area smaller. I generally set these smaller than the defaults.
Go back to you report items and make sure they are smaller than (pagesize - margins)
This should help.
you can try setting InteractiveHeight=0 , I know that at least works for the MHTML output, not sure about PDF, but it might lead you in the right direction