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

[Michael Ross <michael e ross gmail com>]

Chris,

I am not a developer, I am just telling you how it works.  You can get any kind of printing action  with Dia.  You will have to find someone else to argue about this with.  

 "...want to create some diagrams which I will print on A4 paper."

Set up the page to A4, scale the diagram to fit in the page breaks for A4 and hit print..  It will all fit on A4 paper then.  You want multiple pages - put each page inside the bounds of the page breaks and hit  print..

I will suggest one more thing.  If you want to get an open source program (built entirely by volunteers) changed, but you want others to make the change for you, you will find that being cranky will not get you very far.  You can draw more flies with sugar than with vinegar.

One more bit of practical advice.  You are a supplicant here.  You really should treat your benefactors better.

I doubt I will feel encouraged enough by your attitude to discuss the use of Dia with you further.

On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 9:37 AM, Chris Green <cl isbd net> wrote:

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
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Michael E. Ross

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