Printing in Survex

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 10:40:22AM +0100, Graham Mullan wrote:
> | > I have just printed a copy of a plan which I want
> | > to fit on one A3 sheet. At the relevant scale, Aven insists that it
> | > will take 3 sheets of A4, not two, as I cannot alter either the layout
> | > of the information on the bottom of the sheet or the placement of the
> | > plan on the sheet.
> |
> | I'm curious why it doesn't fit.  It should unless it's really close to
> | the size of the page (a small margin is allowed for on each side).
> 
> One thing I have noticed is that (using acrobat distiller as a print
> preview) is that you get a slightly different layout for A3 and 2xA4/ The
> former prints much closer to the edge eof the paper.

It should allow for a margin of about 1cm on each side of the plot
(not taking labels into account sadly).  At the bottom, this starts at
the height of the top of the standard info box (even if it's turned
off with --raw or your printing an extended elevation which has a
info box with 3 lines rather than 4).

The size of the border is arbitrary and could be reduced - 5mm would
probably still look OK.  If --no-border is used, the only reason to
leave a border is so labels don't fall off the edges of the printout.
It's hard to know the exact width of labels without a lot of extra work,
but we could probably estimate their sizes easily.

> | Or is it because of the info box in the bottom left corner?  If you turn
> | that off (with --raw), it doesn't currently notice and take advantage of
> | the extra space.  I'll fix that for 1.0.14 anyhow.
> 
> This may be part of the reason for the effect noted above?

That should only make a difference to the vertical space available, and
only if you're using --raw or printing an extended elevation.

Otherwise, if the A4 is portrait and the A3 landscape (or vice versa),
then the available combined printable area should be similar anyway
- a little smaller for 2 A4 pages since you lose a thin strip between the
pages.

If it's not just because of this slight reduction in the combined
printable area, I'd be interested to investigate.  Can you send me the
3d file concerned?  And if this is on Windows using the native printer
driver (printwin) and you can work out how to do it, postscript files
with the A3 and A4 printouts in...

> export of EPS would be great - anything that would allow export into a
> graphics package would be sooo useful.

The DXF export is probably better for import into a graphics package,
since it puts the information in layers.  But even so EPS is useful,
e.g. for including in a word processed document or similar.

Cheers,
Olly