Describes the printing facilities available in the Designer.

In the Designer, you have the following printing facilities for a Gantt chart:

Print operations are available from the File menu.

You can access Page Setup by choosing File > Page Setup or by selecting the Setup tab in Print Preview. The Page Setup window offers extensive setup facilities.

The following figure shows the Page setup property sheet.

Page layout

In the Page Layout tab, you can select Portrait or Landscape and set paper size and margins. The Designer automatically sets Portrait or Landscape initially according to the shape of the chart.

Header/footer

The Header/Footer tab gives you a selection of headers and footers to choose from and displays a preview of your selection. You can define a custom header and footer. A custom header or footer allows you to set a specific font and to insert and position page numbers, date, time, and file name.

Sheet

The fields in the Sheet tab allow you to control the print range, the way the table is processed, and the order in which pages are printed.

The following table describes the fields that you can set to control the way a Gantt chart is printed. The values in these fields determine the printed data window, which part of the Gantt chart is printed, how the Gantt chart fits on the page, and so on.

The following table lists the fields used to control Page Setup.

Table

The table parameters require some further explanation. The Zoom applied to the table is a physical zoom. What is printed, depends on the way the content is displayed on the screen, so you need to prepare the Gantt chart for printing. Take the project projecttasks.igpr, which is located in:

Make sure that the five table columns are displayed in Editing Mode. Reduce the margins to 0.0 in the Page Layout of Page Setup, but leave the default values for all the other print settings. The following figure shows the Print Preview. The chart will be printed over two pages.

Experiment by reducing the number of table columns to be printed.

The following figure shows the Print Preview. Note that the column and the portion of the sheet printed on the page are enlarged several times both widthways and in height, but the column to be printed displays only the content that could be seen in the chart. The ellipses for incomplete words are still visible; the words are not filled in. The chart will be printed over six pages.

Now, adjust the table so that only one column is displayed in the Gantt chart in Editing Mode and you can see the words in full. Leave the print settings as they were in the previous example. Select Print Preview.

The following figure shows the Print Preview of a one-column table display after preparation of the display in the chart. The chart will be printed over two pages.

The lesson to be learned is:

Print range

If you now set the Print Range to Fit to: 4 page(s) wide, you obtain more space for time in the sheet. The zoom is intelligent and extends the activity bars to be printed over the four pages. However, the physical zoom on the table does not cause the column or columns to be enlarged. On pages 2 to 4, no table is printed, but only the time scale and the extended activity bars in the Gantt sheet. The following figure shows the Print Preview of the final page of the four pages with this setting.

Page order

You can also specify the order in which pages are numbered and printed.

The printing order is different, but the page-numbering is the same, whichever option you select.

The following figure shows the graphical reference for the page-printing order of a six-page document. The sequence of pages is shown as running from A to F, which corresponds to page-numbering from 1 to 6 and the printing order Down, then over and Over, then down as shown in the following graphic.

Printing top to bottom

Print the Gantt chart developed in this Getting Started example with the Down, then over option set, with the chart printed on six pages. The following figure shows the page-printing order by way of the print preview of the first two pages. You can see that it prints all the way down the leftmost part of the Gantt chart, before working its way across the next horizontal span of the chart. You can see that it prints all the way down the leftmost part of the Gantt chart, before working its way across the next horizontal span of the chart.

Printing left to right

Print the Gantt chart developed in this Getting Started example with the Over, then down option set, with the chart printed on six pages. The following figure shows the page-printing order by way of the print preview of the first two pages. You can see that it prints all the way across the first part of the Gantt chart in the horizontal plane, before working its way down to the next horizontal span of the chart.

The Print Preview window allows you to display each page specified in the page setup and view the pages in the order in which they will be numbered and printed. See Printing top to bottom and Printing left to right for more information about the Print Preview facility.

To open the Print Preview window:

You can print one page, all the pages, or selected pages. You can directly control the Page Layout characteristics. You can also specify the printed appearance, by setting features such as color printing and double-sided printing or number of pages per side of paper.

The following figure shows how to set the printing parameters.

To print a Gantt chart to the default printer from the application: